For the most part this is a maintainance release consisting of bug fixes, but as usual a few new features and improvements have managed to creep in. A total of 59 issues were resolved for this release. Some of the new and noteworthy include:

• basic http authentication with cascaded WMS servers
• WMS 1.3 support in the layer preview
• transparent sorting for all data stores, not only those backed by a database
• embedded OpenLayers upgraded to 2.11
• a number of INSPIRE compliance improvements
• support for asynchronous WPS processes

And more. Check out the change log for the entire list. A big thank you to everyone who contributed patches for this release. This includes:

• Tony Young for a monitoring patch to include support for the “user-agent” header (GEOS-4872)
• Tony Young again for a restconfig patch to properly calculate grid dimensions for coverages (GEOS-4753)
• Rudi Hochmeister for a documentation patch providing an installation guide for Debian Linux  (GEOS-4752)
• Frank Gasdorf for a completed German translation (GEOS-4294)

Contributions such as these are what keeps GeoServer moving forward. And thanks to all those who helped out by filing bug reports.

Download 2.1.3, try it out and help us to continue to improve GeoServer by providing feedback on the mailing list and reporting bugs in the issue tracker.

Thanks for using GeoServer!

This release brings some important bug fixes and addresses a few regressions discovered in RC3. This includes a new parameter that will once again allow multiple GeoServer instances to run from a single data directory. This parameter, named “GWC_DISKQUOTA_DISABLED”, will disable the GeoWebCache disk quota module preventing it from maintaining a lock in the data directory.

Other key fixes include an issue with the alternate and more performant method of raster reprojection that comes with the GeoServer 2.1 series, as well as some fixes for WMS 1.3 support surrounding axis ordering issues. Check out the change log for the full list.

Thanks to everyone who tested RC3 and helped us flush out these last few issues. You can continue to help us get to the official 2.1 release by downloading and trying out RC4. Be sure to report any issues in the bug tracker or on the mailing list.

Thanks for using GeoServer!

Download and try 2.1-RC2 now. You can help us reach the final 2.1 release by reporting any bugs in the issue tracker and sending feedback to the mailing list. Thanks for supporting GeoServer.

First up is GeoWebCache integration, allowing clients to enjoy the benefits of tile caching through the regular GeoServer WMS endpoint. This enables GeoWebCache to transparently proxy for the GeoServer WMS without the need for a separate service endpoint. Taking advantage of the recently added disk-quota functionality, GeoWebCache now provides the ability to set limits on the amount of disk space used for storing tiles, allowing users to control and limit the size of the tile cache on disk. Big thanks to Gabriel Roldán for the great GeoWebCache improvements.

This release also brings some improvements to RESTConfig, which is now shipped with GeoServer by default so users need no longer install it as a separate plugin. Improvements to the API include the file upload operation that now allows for uploading files into an existing data store. This addition allows users to upload a shapefile and have it converted automatically into a PostGIS database, publishing it as a PostGIS layer rather than as a Shapefile layer. Finally, the API also supports recursive DELETE operations, making it more convenient to remove resources that contain other resources like stores or workspaces. Thanks to David Winslow and Justin Deoliveira of OpenGeo for these improvements.

Thanks to some great work from the folks at GeoSolutions, raster reprojection performance has improved significantly by using linear appoximations of transformation functions. This improvement was initially added in 2.1-beta3 but has continued to be improved for 2.1-RC1. Those interested should checkout this article that links to a white paper with the full technical details.

Last but certainly not least, thanks to Andrea Aime for the addition of a Web Coverage Service request builder, a handy tool for graphically building WCS requests to test a coverage service. As clients for WCS have always been sparse, this tool goes a long way for making the service more usable.

We are happy to report the contribution of yet another translation of the web admin interface—special thanks to Oscar Fonts for submitting a Catalan translation and to Geodata Sistemas for funding the work.

Also worthy of thanks this round is Ivan Grcic who has submitted some excellent patches, including bug fixes for WMS layer functionality. Thanks Ivan!

As always, a number of other bug fixes and improvements have made it into this release. Check out the change log for all new and noteworthy changes.

Download and try 2.1-RC1 now. You can help us reach the final 2.1 release by reporting any bugs in the issue tracker and sending feedback to the mailing list.

Thanks for supporting GeoServer!

The big feature for this release is support for WMS 1.3. Special thanks goes out to Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, for providing OpenGeo with funding to complete the task. With WMS 1.3 mandated by the INSPIRE Initiative, the Ordnance Survey needed to meet the INSPIRE requirements.  Rather than implement a solution on their own, they opted to fund the GeoServer project so that other organizations in the UK and the rest of Europe and the world could all benefit.

This is the value and the beauty of open source. Government agencies across Europe can now upgrade their servers to the latest GeoServer at no additional cost.  In time, other mapping agencies can and will further benefit one another by funding additional GeoServer improvements, like WFS 2.0 and Application Schema configurations for INSPIRE, but the Ordnance Survey deserves special recognition from all GeoServer users for taking the lead.

In addition to WMS 1.3, this release includes some SLD 1.1 / SE 1.1 enhancements.  It will be possible to use most SE 1.1 documents, though not every new option is fully supported yet.  User feedback on which new options we should support first is greatly appreciated.  Also funded by Ordnance Survey is a community module to implement the WMS extensions for INSPIRE View Service compliance—namely the language parameter and several extended capabilities fields.

The release also includes a few nice fixes and improvements from beta2, such as upgrading CQL to ECQL, and a fix by Eli Miller, a newcomer to the GeoServer community, to allow the REST Config API to properly handle SQL Views.

We encourage you to download GeoServer 2.1-beta3, try it out, and let us know if there are any bugs. This software is still a beta, so we recommend testing extensively before running it in a production environment. That said, we’re hoping to move to 2.1.0 release candidates soon, so any and all testing will this process move along faster.

Download GeoServer 2.1-beta3

WMS Cascading

Something users have asked for since the addition of WMS support itself is cascading, the ability of GeoServer to proxy for another remote WMS server like MapServer or another GeoServer. This feature has many uses such as pulling in a remote base layer and overlaying local vector data onto it or securing a locally unsecured map server. Special thanks to the University of Perugia for sponsoring this feature.

Read more about WMS cascading.

Virtual Services

Anyone who has published a large number of layers or feature types with GeoServer has probably at some point been annoyed by the fact that every single layer is published by a single global service. WMS has the ability to group and nest layers but WFS and WCS have no such equivalent. Well now with virtual services one can create multiple service endpoints within a single physical geoserver instance.

Special thanks to Landgate for funding this work.

Read more about virtual services.

Layers from SQL

GeoServer has always been good at publishing a flat database table. But users often need to do more such as pre filter the data in a table, or join two tables together, or generate column values on the fly with a function. Before this feature the recommendation was to create a view. However views can be a maintenance burden and are at times problematic.

Now one can create a layer directly from an SQL query. And on top of that query definitions can be parameterized which allows one to create dynamic queries on the fly. These parameters can be restricted with regular expressions in order to prevent an SQL injection security hole.

Special thanks to Andrea for spending much of his personal time on this one. And also to OBIS who provided the funding for the parametric component of the work.

Read more about SQL layers.

WPS

With 2.1 and the arrival of WPS we welcome a new OGC service to the family. The Web Processing Service is an OGC service for performing geospatial analysis functions over the web. The specification is extensible in nature and allows for simple processes like buffering a geometry to more complex processes such as image processing.

Historically GeoServer has been focused primarily on data delivery without any tools for performing analysis of spatial data. WPS fills that gap making GeoServer a more compete solution for geospatial web services.

Thanks to Refractions Research for the initial contribution of the WPS module and to Andrea once again for taking personal time to bring WPS support to its current state.

Read more about WPS. Download the WPS extension now to try it out.

Unit of Measure

Support for units in SLD allows one to specify values in measurements other than pixels such as feet or meters. This adds a very powerful capability to SLD that in many cases alleviates the need for multiple scale dependent rendering rules. This has the upside of greatly simplifying complex SLD documents.

Special thanks to Milton Jonathan who did the initial GeoTools work to make unit of measure support possible and to Andrea for working with Milton to improve the initial patch. Note that this feature has also been backported to the stable 2.0.x branch. Thanks to SWECO and Malmö City of Sweden for sponsoring the backport.

Read more about UOM support.

DPI Scaling

By default GeoServer renders images at a resolution of 90 DPI. While this is acceptable for the standard screen it is not acceptable for print which requires a higher resolution. Now it is possible to supply a format option to a WMS request on the fly that controls the DPI setting.

Special thanks again to SWECO and to Malmö City of Sweden for sponsoring this work. Note also that this feature has also been backported to the stable 2.0.x branch.

Read more about DPI scaling.

And More

And as usual this release comes with a number of bug fixes and minor improvements. Check out the entire changelog. Help us get to 2.1.0 by downloading the beta and trying it out. Be sure to report any issues on the mailing list or in the bug tracker.

Thanks for using GeoServer!

Note that by applying the patch the same rules as described here apply. Users will have to either update systems that rely on anonymous access via GET operations or alternatively configure the security subsystem to allow them.

Recently the issue of security has come up with regards to the restconfig plug-in. Essentially it boils down to the fact that GeoServer allows anonymous access to any resource or service when the HTTP request method is GET. In the case of restconfig this can make sensitive information available anonymously such as database connection parameters which can contain passwords and the like.

To remedy this situation in 2.0.1 the GeoServer security subsystem has been extended to allow for configuring access to RESTful services. This is documented in the user guide.

The major caveat for users upgrading to 2.0.1 is that any systems that depended on the previous behavior of allowing GET access to resources without authentication will undoubtedly break. In this case users have two options:

1. Start supplying administrator credentials with all requests
2. Reconfigure GeoServer to allow for anonymous access for GET operations

A patch has been created for 1.7.x users as well.

Try it out. Please report any issues to the GeoServer users list. Thanks for using GeoServer!

So what is new in 2.0? The first new feature that people will notice is a completely new web administration interface. Based on the Wicket framework the new user interface provides a much more integrated and streamlined application for configuring GeoServer. Wicket makes developing ajax enabled applications trivial by doing all the hard work for you.

One of the powerful features of Wicket for the developer is extensibility. Wicket allows one to plug-in components dynamically. This means that developers can now easily write plug-ins and extensions for the GeoServer UI. And some have already done so. Francesco Izzi and the developers from the geoSDI project have contributed a plug-in for configuring the GeoServer security sub system. Special thanks for the great contribution.

The 2.0 release also hails the home coming of the “complex features” branch and true support for application schemas. Led by Ben Caradoc-Davies and Rini Angreani, developers from CSIRO have made this functionality available in the core of GeoServer. Special thanks to them and to AuScope for funding the work. Check out the documentation for more information about getting started with application schemas.

New features has not been the only focus of 2.0. Much work has also gone into scalability and performance in order to ensure that GeoServer continues to improve not only in terms of new features, but also that it continues to get faster.

Much of this work came in preparation for the WMS Shootout at FOSS4G in Sydney this year. Great thanks goes out to Andrea Aime for not only representing GeoServer in this benchmarking exercise, but also for the countless number of hours he has poured into improving GeoServer performance and robustness.

As with any release many minor features and bug fixes have gone into 2.0. Be sure to check out the GeoServer Past Present Future talk given at FOSS4G that provides an overview of what else has gone on this year in preparation for 2.0.

Download 2.0 now and try it out. Please help us to continue to improve GeoServer by reporting any issues you encounter on the mailing list and bug tracker.

The most noteworthy feature for 2.0-beta2 is the official inclusion of the app-schema extension. Most people probably know app-schema better as complex features, a feature GeoServer has been striving toward for the past three years. The extension gives GeoServer WFS the ability to support complex feature application schemas such as GeoSciML. Much thanks goes out to Ben Caradoc-Davies, Rini Angreani, and the rest of the AuScope* team for seeing this work through and actually making complex feature support a reality in GeoServer.

For those who missed the previous post about it, Ben and the folks from AuScope recently hosted a complex feature workshop in Perth, Australia, in which a number of the GeoServer developers were brought out. Special thanks for AuScope for hosting the event, which was a great success.

A special thanks also goes out to users who have been downloading the 2.0 alpha and beta releases, trying them out and reporting bugs. The more bug reports we get the faster we can get to the official 2.0 release. This should be the final beta release of 2.0 before it moves into release candidate phase, so stay tuned for RC1 coming soon.

* AuScope Ltd is funded under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), an Australian Commonwealth Government Programme.