GeoServer Blog » Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org Everything GeoServer, and a little more Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:28:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 GeoServer 1.5.0-RC2 released http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/11/geoserver-150-rc2-released/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/11/geoserver-150-rc2-released/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 03:14:20 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/11/geoserver-150-rc2-released/ The GeoServer team is proud to announce the second release candidate for the 1.5 series. This release brings us closer to the stable 1.5.0 release of GeoServer that contains the new and exciting coverage support (WCS). To compliment the release we have created more documentation and tutorials, along with some tools to help you process your raster images.

You can download the latest version here.

Changes in this version include:
- Bug fixes
- Kml returns proper PNG files
- Kml strips out illegal characters now
- Improved error messages
- UI improvements
- Inline features are back
- Links to old homepage updated
- Performance optimization

The full changelog for this release can be found here. ]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/11/geoserver-150-rc2-released/feed/ 0 Call For Workshops http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/06/call-for-workshops/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/06/call-for-workshops/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:58:29 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/06/call-for-workshops/ 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.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/03/06/call-for-workshops/feed/ 2 GeoServer 1.5.0-RC1 released http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/12/geoserver-150-rc1-released/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/12/geoserver-150-rc1-released/#comments Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:36:51 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/12/geoserver-150-rc1-released/ 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.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/12/geoserver-150-rc1-released/feed/ 3 New Coverage Tutorials http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/04/new-coverage-tutorials/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/04/new-coverage-tutorials/#comments Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:05:12 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/04/new-coverage-tutorials/ 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.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/02/04/new-coverage-tutorials/feed/ 2 GeoServer Mentioned in GIM International http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/31/geoserver-mentioned-in-gim-international/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/31/geoserver-mentioned-in-gim-international/#comments Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:21:15 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/?p=21 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.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/31/geoserver-mentioned-in-gim-international/feed/ 0 GeoServer 1.5.0-beta2 released http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/22/geoserver-150-beta2-released/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/22/geoserver-150-beta2-released/#comments Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:02:04 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/?p=19 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.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/22/geoserver-150-beta2-released/feed/ 6 IBM and DB2 http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/17/18/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/17/18/#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:47:11 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/?p=18 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.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/17/18/feed/ 0 Google Earth and GeoServer http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/04/google-earth-and-geoserver/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/04/google-earth-and-geoserver/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:54:36 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/?p=17 As some of you may know, GeoServer can serve up WMS data as KML or KMZ for Google Earth. There is a full video tutorial located here on how to set it up.

One of the tools GeoServer has to make serving up KML/KMZ easier is a reflector script. This exists so people don’t have to type in an entire WMS request URL to view the data in Google Earth. Here is an example of its use:

http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wms/kml_reflect?layers=states

By using this URL, you can ignore all the other WMS information. Information such as projection, image size, output format etc. You can also specify more than one layer by just separating the layer names with commas: layers=states,roads,lakes

The reflector will take the layer names and fill in the missing information, then return back a full WMS request. Users have asked why a URL is being returned when they use the reflector in their web browser. The reflector is meant to be used within Google Earth in a Network Link. The network link will interpret the returned WMS request and send it off again to GeoServer to get the real KML data back. So at first it makes two requests to get the real data, but after that it updates with just one get map request.

One recent item of discussion has been how to format the description of the features that are returned. In KML you can return an HTML description of the data.

ge attributes

What we do is take all of the feature information and put it into an HTML table that pops up when you click on the feature. But say if you wanted to hide some of the attribution, or turn some value into hyper links, there is no current way to do this (at least with not hacking the code). A few ideas have been suggested: including the formatting information into the SLD file, have a separate SLD-like file for just the descriptions, and XML transforms with a template document. In order to make a decision on which path to take, we would like some input from the users: use-case scenarios, requirements, etc.

So drop us a line and tell us what you think.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/01/04/google-earth-and-geoserver/feed/ 3 GeoServer 1.4.0 has arrived! http://blog.geoserver.org/2006/12/15/geoserver-140-has-arrived/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2006/12/15/geoserver-140-has-arrived/#comments Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:15:43 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/?p=15 It’s finally here! Version 1.4.0 is out the door and kicking. This is quite an exciting release for us because it is taking GeoServer in a new, more developer friendly, direction with the Spring framework it is built on. What we gain from this new framework is the ability to modularize GeoServer into separate components and allow for outside developers to create plug-ins easily. It used to be a lot more difficult to add extensions, comparatively to what we have now, and this means that we can look forward to new and interesting additions from the many users out there.

That said, I will point you at the documentation that describes just how to write your own plug-in: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDOC/4+Programmers+Guide

Of course there are many bug fixes and improvements in this release. We have also worked on stability a fair amount and are currently testing version 1.4.0 on our demo server: Sigma . So if you have a WMS up and running, feel free to point it at our layers and use our data. The more we can hit the server the easier it will be to find problems.

Hot on the heels of this release is GeoServer 1.5 with Web Coverage Service support. We hope to see the first release candidate in January. So stay tuned!

You can grab the 1.4.0 release here.

]]> http://blog.geoserver.org/2006/12/15/geoserver-140-has-arrived/feed/ 1 Client applications http://blog.geoserver.org/2006/11/27/client-applications/ http://blog.geoserver.org/2006/11/27/client-applications/#comments Mon, 27 Nov 2006 23:00:43 +0000 Brent Owens http://blog.geoserver.org/?page_id=14 These are some of our favorite client applications. There are some others out there and you can refer to the GeoServer client page for more information.

MapBuilder
A javascript client that supports OGC WMS and WFS requests, so you can view and edit spatial data through the web browser. GeoServer has MapBuilder built in as its map preview tool.

Open Layers
OpenLayers is a javascript tiling web-based client just like Google maps. It supports OGC WMS requests.

MapBender
Mapbender is the software and portal site for geodata management of OGC OWS architectures. The software provides web technology for managing spatial data services implemented in PHP, JavaScript and XML. It provides a data model and interfaces for displaying, navigating and querying OGC compliant map services. The Mapbender framework furthermore provides authentication and authorization services, OWS proxy functionality, management interfaces for user, group and service administration in WebGIS projects.

Udig
Udig is a desktop client that supports OGC WMS and WFS requests. It is built off of the same library as GeoServer: GeoTools.

GVSig
GVSig is a desktop client that supports OGC WMS and WFS requests, similar to Udig.

Google Earth
GeoServer can serve up data as KML/KMZ that can then be loaded in Google Earth. There is a tutorial here that you can read to start viewing your in this client.

NASA World Wind
World Wind supports WMS requests so you can serve up your data with GeoServer to it. Read this tutorial for how to do this.

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