Geoserver 1.5.1-rc1 has been released, and can be downloaded from SourceForge.

This release contains a number of interesting new features such as:

• Chinese translation

• Portuguese translation

• OpenLayers map preview (replaces the MapBuider previews)

• KML legend support

• KML superoverlay / region support

• Multiple base map layers can now be configured

• Support for CRS with units other than meters is back

And as always numerous bug fixes. The entire issue log can be found here on our Jira issue tracker.

We’d like to release this one as stable soon. Please test it, and let us know if you spot any significant regression.

Just wanted to share some international developments in the community - the energy in Brazil around GeoServer seems to have crystallized in some great ways. Fernando Quadro has informed us that he gave an introductory course to GeoServer at III ENUM. Afterwards participants were interesting in sustaining communication, so they started a new GeoServer Portuguese mailing list. After he let us know about this we put out a call for Portuguese translations to the web administration tool, which someone from his lab completed, and is now in our repositories for release in 1.5.1 (coming very soon). Also on the Brazilian front, Puneet Kishor recently went on a fruitful trip to Brazil, and has got us in touch with Lúbia Vinhas, the Development Manager of the TerraLib project. I learned about TerraLib when I lived in Brazil for six months, and it’s a very impressive piece of work. We’re hoping to talk more about how to integrate OGC standards and the OSGeo stack with their great work, to share more collaborative effort. It may not end up being GeoTools/GeoServer directly, since their work is C++, but we’ll at least be able to talk across interfaces with a bit of work.

We love to hear about local efforts to spread GeoServer, and are always happy to publicize on the main blog and mailing lists. A great first step is a translation of the web administration tool, we also recently got a Chinese translation, to add to the existing French, Spanish, German and Japanese. After that there is documentation and local language forums/mailing lists, which are a great way for non-English speakers to get up to speed, so keep us posted if you’re doing anything along those lines.

Just a quick note, we’ve recently gone live with our new homepage, at geoserver.org. Yes, we know it looks almost just like the old one. The one big new ‘feature’ is that we’ve incorporated a little OpenLayers demo, that serves up data from GeoServer. And it also has a better display of this blog.

The ‘back end’ reason we’ve moved, however, is so that http://geoserver.org becomes the main GeoServer address. We’ve been posting it as our address as much as possible, but since it’s just a redirect it doesn’t necessarily show up in search engines or bookmarks. Eventually we may want to move off of codehaus (though they’ve been great, and we thank them for all their support, we just sometimes want a bit more control), and setting the new homepage now will make that process much easier when the time comes. So please update your bookmarks and any links that you have to use geoserver.org as our main homepage. Thanks!

Theodor Foerster, of 52North and ITC, has been leveraging GeoServer in his work on generalization of geospatial data using the new Web Processing Service specification. He recently posted some nice new work, including updates to the Web Processing Service web app, as well as a new WPS client written as a plug-in to uDig. Awhile ago he also did some prototypes of integrating the WPS with GeoServer, making the WPS a datastore that could be served out as WMS and WFS. It’s great to see new open source tools being built that can use and leverage the work we’ve done with GeoServer. You can see his work in action, with GeoServer, in the screencast that he’s also posted.

Eventually we’re hoping to be able to offer some integration between GeoServer and his WPS work, possibly as a plug-in to GeoServer that makes it really easy to install both, and to do common data configuration through our web gui. In the past we’ve also talked to the FROGS WPS community about possible integrations as well. Since we’re evolving GeoServer to be a platform it makes a lot of natural sense to be able to bring WPS in to the mix, in some form. It looks like the FROGS people are also leveraging Spring, which may help compatibility as well (we haven’t talked to them for awhile so I suppose we can just cross our fingers that they’re looking at what we’ve done). So if anyone has the time or the money to get a WPS integrated with GeoServer, let us know, as we’ve got some great pieces to work with.

We recently learned about IBM’s DB2 Express-C database, a free version of DB2 that comes with less restrictions than the free Oracle XE (which GeoServer also supports through Oracle Locator).  Our main curiosity is if it will work with GeoServer.  So we got in touch with David Adler, our community member from IBM, to ask if it will work out of the box.  The answer is that it’s not quite ‘out of the box’, but that one only needs to download and install the spatial extender, which is also a free download.  David additionally assures us that the information on this developerworks article is wrong, and that spatial extender is available with the Express-C edition.  The only restrictions on it are related to the capacity of the machine you’re running it on, only 2 dual core chips and up to 4 gigabytes of ram.  But there are no restrictions on the size of the database.  If you have some good experience with Express-C and GeoServer please let us know, in the comments or an email.