01.31.08
Another GeoServer Roadmap update
Though it’s a bit overdue, we finally got around to updating the GeoServer Roadmap. There’s a lot of activity going on, and we generally have a good sense of what should be completed in the next three months, with more and more vague ideas on what may be further out. I still want to work some more on the long term / dream section, as I’ve had some more fun thoughts recently. But there should be a lot of great work in the next few months, which is exciting. Highlights include online SLD editing, integrated tile caching, security improvements, a better ‘preview’ application, and more. The thing I’m most excited about is the REST configuration service, which should make it much easier to add data programmatically, and is how we’re going to integrate with GeoNetwork Open Source.
The best part of updating the roadmap is looking back at what we hoped to accomplish and seeing what we succeeded in. This time is a bit of a softball, since we are late on updating so the ’short term’ ones were supposed to be finished several months ago. But we aimed to do quite a bit, and most of it has come to pass. GeoServer 1.6.x is just about to go to 1.6.0, with not only a new security framework, WFS 1.1 and versioning WFS, but also great increases in speed and reliability. KML support has improved a lot, and is only getting better, as we have some more funded work to make it stream large datasets really well. The new output formats - GeoRSS, 8bit PNGs, and GeoJSON are now all released and performing well. And we’ve got a new security system and backend for geocollaboration. The prototype for a GeoServer 2.0 was built, and feels ready to move on, though unfortunately it has not moved much past a prototype phase. The only short term goal that was not completed was ECW, MrSID and JPEG2000 support, but those are actively being worked on right now, and we expect at least one pretty soon. Thanks to everyone for all their hard work, things are really coming together in to a great product, and the future looks even brighter - we’re truly only just getting started.