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.

Last week one of our users alerted us that IBM is now listing GeoServer as an open source option for DB2, their spatial database offering. This is obviously a nice endorsement of GeoServer, as IBM is a serious player and DB2 is their premier spatial database, and they are pointing their users to GeoServer as a great way to present and edit spatial information from their database.

We checked with David Adler, our contact at IBM, and he told us that yes, we could let the world know that the GeoTools DB2 datastore was written by him and contributed by IBM. IBM is obviously no slouch about open source, with their Eclipse and Derby offerings, and it’s great that this has extended a bit to the spatial domain. Instead of writing their own WFS, WFS-T and WMS interfaces for DB2, they realized that creating a datastore for GeoTools, which is used by GeoServer and uDig, could have a much bigger impact for much less work.

David also informed us that IBM is planning Spatial Support for DB2 V9 for zOS (IBM mainframe) which will provide comparable capabilities of the current DB2 Spatial Extender for Windows and *IX platforms. He’s got fixes for the DB2 GeoTools plug-in to support DB2 on zOS, and plans on checking them in by the time it emerges as a general release.

It’s great to see the industry recognize open source and show their support for it. The open development model easily allows for new extensions and features to be added, without forcing contributors to jump through a lot of hoops. This leads to some excellent plug-ins such as MySQL, ArcSDE, Oracle, and VPF. New data formats are welcome and the community is always eager to help you get started on developing one of your own, or tell you how to add to existing ones. Suggestions and requests are welcome too so send them our way.