Several deadlines are approaching to turn in proposals for conferences and events, most notably FOSS4G and Google’s Summer of Code, and we are currently working out what we would like to present. This is a great time to get input from the community to see what you would like us to talk about, demo, teach, and share with everyone. So lets talk briefly about the two events and what we have planned so far:

FOSS4G: This year it is being held in Victoria BC, Canada, and is a great conference to learn about everything geospatial that is open source. Last year we presented a three hour workshop to teach people the basics of setting up and using GeoServer. To plan for this year we would like to start by getting input now on what you would like us to cover. So far we have proposed doing more than one workshop: a basic one and a more advanced one. The basic workshop would cover: installing GeoServer, simple WMS queries, simple WFS queries, and some work with SLD. The advanced workshop, if we have one, could contain a number of topics from advanced WFS-T to creating your own GeoServer plugins in Java. If you have any ideas on what you would like to have us talk about, please let us know. We want to make sure you get the most out of the conference.

Google Summer of Code: This provides a unique opportunity to get your hands dirty with some open source code and get paid at the same time! We are thinking about an entry or two and have started a discussion page. Jot some ideas down on the wiki page or talk about it in this blog post. We are open for any ideas. Current ideas we have are: an SLD editor, GPS to shapefile tool, a server use/availability Google desktop widget.

One of the nicest little pieces of software we’ve come across in the last few months has been MetaCarta’s TileCache, which performs a very specific job - caching WMS requests for use in clients that understand tiles - and does it very well. We are making good use of it on our demo site, to give an even better user experience in terms of the speed the map shows up.

Chris and Schuyler gave lots of advice on how to use it in conjunction with OpenLayers, so we thought it’d be worthwhile to write up a new tutorial for GeoServer users looking to make use of it. And there are a few tips and tricks that will likely be useful to others, especially some of the nice things you can do in OpenLayers that make it work better with TileCache, like setting multiple host names to cheat the browsers connection limit and setting OL to try to reload when it gets pink tiles.

We hope to eventually be able to ship a nice integrated GeoServer plug-in that will run a TileCache with a nice GUI and enable easy integration with nice distributed java caches. The ideal would be to share code with TileCache and run in jython, but if that’s not possible we will likely do a hand port and leverage JAI. A big kudos to the MetaCarta programmers, it’s a very nice piece of code.

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.