We have just released our first release candidate for the 1.5 series of GeoServer that you can download here. The main feature of 1.5 is support for ‘raster’ formats, like geotiff, arcgrid, gtopo30, and more. These are accessible not just through the WMS, but there also through the new Web Coverage Service (WCS) interface.  In line with GeoServer’s mission of making geospatial data more accessible, this allows access to the raw information of rasters, just as WFS does for vector formats. The WCS is passing all OGC compliance tests, and we plan on getting it certified when we go to 1.5.0. This release brings many fixes and improvements and it is also now backwards compatible to 1.3 and 1.4 data directories, so you do not have to port your data over to the new structure. Along with speed improvements, it also had a little reorganization of the user interface and has a couple tutorials to go along with it:

Since this is a release candidate, we would appreciate it if you could all download it and give it a quick try. Mostly for testing the backwards compatibility to old data directories, and for deployment in your existing systems to make sure there is no loss in functionality.

Along with this release are some coverage data assistance tools from Geo-Solutions. They will make your life of processing coverage data easier. It is in an early release stage so please report any bugs or problems back to us. We will be adding more documentation to it in the mean time.

In light of our upcoming official 1.5 release, we have made a couple tutorials about Coverages to assist in the transition. For beginners, we have a tutorial that walks through the basic steps of adding a TIFF dataset to GeoServer. And then for the more advanced user, there is a tutorial on creating and adding an image mosaic to GeoServer.

We have also updated our other documentation to tie in coverages, but if you see any gaps in the documentation or would like more information on coverages or various data formats, drop us a line here on the blog or on the mailing list.

GeoServer took part in this years Open Web Services Initiative as the reference implementation of the next version of the Web Feature Specification. WFS 1.1 brings a few new nice features to GeoServer WFS, such as sorting, GML 3, and coordinate reference system support.

Along with WFS 1.1 support comes a few nice improvements to the GeoServer core itself. The most notable being an improved dispatching system which allows developers to develop services as plain old java objects (pojos), not having to implement complex interfaces of any sort. This brings us a good step closer to having GeoServer be a true framework for people wishing to develop new services.

A preliminary version is available as a Web Archive and as Source.

The GIS magazine GIM International has an article about GeoServer that summarizes up our development process and features really well. It also takes a good look at the previous year’s development efforts and what you can expect to see in the future. Take a look at the article here.

We have released our second beta version of GeoServer 1.5.0. It contains many bug fixes and improvements. You can find the download here. Another useful feature it has is the ability to add coverages outside of your data directory.

Our next round of releases before the official 1.5.0 release are going to contain several larger changes that should clean up the UI and also introduce a suite of useful coverage tools, such as a Pyramid Builder and an Image Mosaic tool. This beta release will help us figure out what users want and need for the official release. So please try it out and give us lots of feedback either on our mailing list or on this blog.