05.07.08
Posted in Announcements at 4:42 pm by arneke
Chris Holmes and I are at JavaOne in San Francisco this week, and Chris and Justin will also be going to Where 2.0. We are wondering whether there are any GeoServer users here, or in the bay area in general, that would be interested in meeting for lunch?
Tentatively around noon tomorrow, Thursday the 8th, near the Moscone center. Just an informal chat and a great opportunity to meet other users. Please email ak+meetup@openplans.org if you’re interested and I’ll be in touch with the details.
Also email me if you’re going to Where 2.0, we’ll try do something similar there as well.
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04.28.08
Posted in User perspectives at 11:22 am by Mike Pumphrey
I just wanted to give a quick hello to those in the wider world working on GeoServer. The GeoServer website recently got a bump in network traffic, and when we investigated, we saw it was directed by a group in Russia called GIS-Lab, who have an introduction to using GeoServer on their site. (Google translation)
Also, if you are a faithful reader of this blog, you’ll notice that Fernando Quadro often paraphrases some of our posts in Portuguese. There is a GeoServer mailing list in Portuguese as well. Earlier this month, the GeoServer website was “slashdotted” by Slashdot Japan regarding a company which is using OpenLayers, GeoServer, and GeoWebCache.
We currently have local translations for our web interface in Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. We’re always looking for people to write more localizations as well (please see our website for information on how to localize GeoServer). We’re eventually looking to have the core of our documentation translated as well.
This is all very promising, as it shows that the need for an open-source mapping framework is a worldwide desire, transcending the boundaries of nation and language. We have set up a page denoting these international resources. If you know of other GeoServer blogs, mailing lists, or other websites that we may not be aware of, please add them to that page, as we would love to know about them.
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04.16.08
Posted in Features at 10:04 am by Mike Pumphrey
As time goes on, more and more systems are moving towards 64 bit architecture. Pretty much all new servers are 64 bit, and the vast majority of desktop/laptop systems are 64 bit as well. (And if you are running SPARC hardware, well, then you’ve been running 64 bit hardware since 1995, but that’s a different story.) We at GeoServer HQ are starting to get this question more and more: Does GeoServer run on 64 bit systems?
The quick answer: yes!
GeoServer is built entirely on Java. Therefore, it can run on any hardware supported by Sun’s Java Runtime Environment. Unlike compiled languages, like C++, as long as the JRE supports the architecture, GeoServer can come along for the ride. Happily, 64 bit support exists in Java. So without any redesign or recompiling on our part, GeoServer can be run on 64 bit systems. That’s points for Java!
However, there are some caveats. Sun’s 64 bit JRE has been known be a bit buggier than their 32 bit version, which could be of concern in a production environment. Also, and probably related, performance takes a small hit with 64 bit (on the order of a few percent). Although there will be more discussion here later about performance tips, this seems like as good a place as any to mention that if performance is an issue on your system, we recommend that you look at updating your JRE to the latest version, if you can. Version 1.5 is much faster than 1.4, and version 1.6 appears to be roughly twice as fast as 1.5 in the context of running GeoServer. So, if you are moving to 64 bit but can’t afford the performance hit, you may want to look at updating your Java version as well.
Moving to 64 bit doesn’t need to be an either/or situation either. Our servers here (all 64 bit) are running both 32 bit and 64 bit Java instances, with few difficulties. Your mileage may vary. And of course, the big advantage of 64 bit is the ability to access more than 4 GB of RAM. This may not be an issue in your environment now, but if history is any guide, it will be eventually.
For more information on running GeoServer in a production environment, please see this guide.
Many software companies are at pains to inform the community when they offer 64 bit support. We have never explicitly mentioned this feature before because it has been offered from the beginning. We can’t take credit for the work, but we can surely enjoy the perks.
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04.15.08
Posted in Announcements at 10:47 pm by arneke
GeoWebCache has been pulled apart and put together again with Spring, the result is version 0.8.0 (click here to download WAR and source) and it is much more modular and configurable than previous versions. The goal of this exercise was to make it easier to integrate with GeoServer, which has already been done and will be documented very soon. GWC can now configure itself automatically based on a WMS getCapabilities document and serve both EPSG:4326 and EPSG:900913 using the same layer definition. It can also create KML super-overlays for Google Earth, in addition to the Virtual Earth and Google Maps support that was introduced in 0.7.2.
Along the way I learned that there have been some issues with JPEG and metatiling, and consequently GeoWebCache now falls back to Java 2D (instead of JAI) when dealing with those. Note that URLs used in GWC, and a few configuration parameters, have changed since the previous version.
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04.09.08
Posted in Announcements at 10:25 am by Mike Pumphrey
The GeoServer team would like to announce the release of 1.6.3. This is a stable release containing over 30 patches and improvements since 1.6.2.
One of the more visible additions is support for watermarking. People have been asking for this for some time, so thanks to GeoSolutions for implementing it. Also, coverage reprojection now works much better. Thanks to Martin Desruisseaux of Geomatys for the continued support on the GeoServer CRS subsystem. KML generation has been optimized (faster, less memory consumption) especially when dealing with large geometries. GeoServer supports so many projections natively, but that can have its downsides, namely when certain clients aren’t prepared for the size of the capabilities document! Now the SRS list can be limited in the WMS capabilities. Special thanks to Gabriel Roldán for the above two features.
You can view the 1.6.3 changelog for details, and download from geoserver.org. Thanks to the community for continually improving GeoServer. Please continue to submit those bug reports and feature requests.
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04.01.08
Posted in Announcements at 3:58 pm by Mike Pumphrey
Development pushes ever on here, and I’d like to mention that the very first build of the 1.7.x branch has been released. 1.7.0-alpha1 is very much an alpha release, with the usual applicable caveats. The major developments are Xlink support for WFS 1.1 and a full implementation of WCS 1.1.1. This release is based on GeoTools 2.5.x.
GeoTools 2.5.x contains the new feature model, which should be able to handle the full complexity of GML and any other model that architects may throw at us. There is still a lot of work to fully incorporate it in to GeoServer, but this alpha release does represent the first step forward towards that goal.
You can get 1.7.0-alpha1 on the Latest download page, while 1.6.2 is still available on the Stable page.
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03.31.08
Posted in Announcements at 11:45 am by Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project (TOPP), the main sponsor of GeoServer development, is pleased to announce the recent hiring of Andreas Hocevar, one of the top five committers of OpenLayers, the default front end mapping engine for GeoServer. Andreas has been doing a lot of work in OpenLayers on SLD, the open standard to style maps, which is what GeoServer uses to define styles. His initial work will be focused on intuitive creation of SLDs for GeoServer, utilizing OpenLayers and the Ext.js gui framework. This will be one of the main pieces of the plan to let everyone remix maps. Afterwards he will continue to work on applications built on both frameworks and open standards. We are excited to have Andreas aboard to help TOPP continue to expand its offerings to a full open geospatial stack, and to strengthen the relationship between GeoServer and OpenLayers.
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03.24.08
Posted in Announcements at 11:11 am by Chris Holmes
Just wanted to get a quick note in the blog, that Google Summer of Code is now open for student applications. GeoServer is participating as part of OSGeo’s project. We participated last year as well, and had a great success with Chris Whitney’s JTileCache project, which has since evolved in to GeoWebcache. There is the opportunity to improve GeoWebcache this year, as well as potential projects on SQL Server, some Amazon Web Services related ones, spatial index for H2 and more. See the ideas page, and if you’re a student (or mentor) with another idea please don’t hesitate to propose it. The developers can help flesh out ideas on the lists and on IRC. Oh, and the deadline for students to apply is March 31st, next Monday, so get working on your applications as soon as possible, as the process moves quickly.
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Posted in User perspectives at 10:16 am by Mike Pumphrey
Greetings all.
I am new to the GIS world. Well, not entirely. I’ve been an avid map fan since I was a wee lad, and to this day I own a small but extensive collection of Rand McNally Road Atlases. Fast forward the tape a bit, and here I am at The Open Planning Project, as an Outreach Engineer for GeoServer. However, despite some years of working in technical fields and some more years of ogling nice-looking maps, I must confess that I was and still am, shall we say, a novice to the technology surrounding GIS.
Here at TOPP, I see myself as a facilitator between those who use GeoServer, those who code/develop for it, and those who are somewhere in between. That said, I’ve still needed to bootstrap myself into being versed in the terminology. So, I picked up “GIS for Web Developers” by Scott Davis. Since then I have thumbed through a few other books and a fair chunk of online information, but by far, this has been the most helpful in getting me started.
The book follows a fairly straightforward arc, starting with a discussion of vectors and rasters. Two of my initial questions were answered quickly. The first was “where does all this data come from?” and the second, “what exactly is the data, anyway?” These may seem trivial, but it’s of course very hard to not see as obvious things that one works with as a matter of routine. (I can recall being very perplexed when I was first introduced to the Web, when trying to figure out the URL. Where was it going? What was it doing?) Although I can’t create a Shapefile out of thin air now (Adobe Illustrator for some reason doesn’t have it in its Export menu) I know that I can probably find what I need either from government websites or a small but growing community of neogeographers. As for what’s contained in the data, the answer is “a gratifyingly large amount of useful info”. The book covers Shapefiles, PostGIS databases, and other standard formats of the trade.
The discussion makes a sharp turn and delves into command-line utilities for editing and querying data inside spatial databases. Perhaps it was my background, but I thought that this topic might have sat more comfortably towards the back of the book, as it’s good information, but with a much steeper learning curve than what came before it. After delving very deep into the OGC web services, the book ends with a “Final Exam” of the complete process from non-geocoded data to spatial database to web browser. If one can follow the last chapter, one understands the relevant concepts. I think I’m nearly there.
One of the most beneficial aspects of the book was the clear definitions of terms, as the meanings of, say, DataStore and FeatureType were not intrinsically obvious to me. It was also quite nice to see GeoServer represented so favorably in the book, both from a practical point of view and as well from a root-for-the -home-team sort of way. But ESRI’s ArcExplorer is given as much treatment as, say, MapBuilder, which is nice for comparison’s sake. I have yet to spend too much time on anything past GeoServer and OpenLayers, but that’ll change in time, I’m sure.
Personally, I wished the book had delved more quantitatively into projections. However, I recognize that my interest lies mainly in the mathematics, and the tools that people have created shield the user from some of the more unseemly calculations. My coworkers have consistently said, “you don’t need to know any of that stuff,” which may in fact be true, but keeping projections as a black box isn’t quite in the spirit of the book. It’s a minor gripe, though.
All in all, I found this a great book with which to get started. While not trying to hide from the jargon, the reader isn’t bogged down with so much granularity that the plot is lost. That’s a sweet spot that most technical books miss. I’m no expert, and won’t be for a while, but at least I feel like I know what questions to ask. And knowing how to ask the right questions is so much more difficult than finding the answers.
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03.20.08
Posted in Announcements at 10:54 am by Chris Holmes
Many of you have likely noticed that the main GeoServer site is migrating from docs.codehaus.org to the much easier to remember geoserver.org. This has been a long running process, that we’re finally approaching the end of. We were hoping to have automatic redirection from the old site to the new, but are waiting on a task to be done on the codehaus server (you may be able to help by voting on the issue - follow the link and if you have a jira account you should be able to click a link to vote). If that doesn’t happen then we will likely delete those spaces in a month or two, so please update your bookmarks to the documentation now, so that they continue to work. Note the structure of the pages is exactly the same as the old, so if there is a page like http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Roadmap the new location will be http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Roadmap.
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