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.

The first major improvement is label rendering. In version 1.7.1, GeoServer added support for curved labeling. In this version, support is added for wrapped labels, which enables a label to span multiple lines. This feature affects the labeling of points and polygons.

Thanks to Andrea Aime for all the great labeling improvements.

Another new styling feature is support for hatching. Among many other new designs, this allows railroad styling to be accomplished for the first time. Also, polygon hatched fills can now be drawn, and GeoServer ships with a new style, pophatch.sld, that can be applied to the topp:states layer to see this in action.

The 1.7.2 release also brings some great new extensions. The HTML imagemap extension (download), contributed by Mauro Bartolomeoli, allows a user to add interactive features to a map without the use of Flash, SVG, or other dynamic content languages. You can check out the imagemap extension in action. A special thanks to Mauro for the contribution.

The new and improved DB2 extension (download), which allows connection with IBM DB2 databases is based on the GeoTools JDBC Next Generation framework. The extension was contributed by Christian Müller, who is an active member of the GeoTools community. Special thanks to Christian.

The new OGR extension (download) is based on the GDAL/OGR library. The extension adds the ability to output from WFS any of the formats supported by OGR. OGR has a very diverse and comprehensive list of output formats, so this extension very much enhances the utility of the GeoServer WFS.

Improvements were also made to the GeoExt styler extension (download), which is a new graphical interface for map styling initially released with GeoServer 1.7.1. Tim Schaub, Andreas Hocevar, and the rest of the GeoExt team have added support for labels to the styler application.

Thanks to the GeoExt team for this great improvement.

In addition, a total of 70 issues were handled for 1.7.2.

Thanks to everyone who contributed features and bug reports for this release. We encourage you to download GeoServer 1.7.2, try it out, and let us know what you think. Comments and feedback are always welcome on the mailing list, as the community is always interested to hear how people are using GeoServer. Stay tuned for the 1.7.3 release, slated for release in the next month, which will include improvements to Geo Search, and the official release of the REST configuration API.

The GeoExt library is a javascript framework for building rich web based mapping applications which is built on top of the the OpenLayers and Ext libraries. The project has recently kicked itself off with the forming of a mailing list, and a call for participation.

The biggest improvement in this release is better Google Earth support.   Using revamped KML output (known as the KML “reflector”) GeoServer can now output vector super-overlays.  Prior to this version, data served by GeoServer when viewed in Google Earth would only update when the the camera stopped.  With super-overlays, however, views are updated dynamically.  Data is also broken up into regions which are used to sort features into a hierarchy so that more prominent features are visible at higher zoom levels and less prominent features become visible at lower zoom levels. Super-overlays also work on raster datasets, providing lower resolutions versions of imagery (overviews) at higher zoom levels and higher resolutions at lower zoom levels.

All of this is is a huge step for GeoServer, as it is now the first major GIS server to return placemarks, lines, and polygons with the super-overlay mechanism.  This means that serving data through Google Earth is a more seamless experience; your data will look like it is naturally part of Google Earth.  And with super-overlays, you can serve large amounts of data with minimal performance issues.

In addition to super-overlays, GeoServer now has support for adding a height attribute to features (also known as “extrudes”), which allows Google Earth to render data in 3-D. Height information is specified via a template, similar to how one specifies time attributes to create animations.  We have a nice tutorial on how to use the height feature with super-overlays, to see this in action, but here’s a quick screenshot.

Although the default mode of output using the improved KML reflector is now the super-overlay mode, the previous default, refresh mode, is still available. Also available is a download mode which outputs a self-contained KML file, useful for situations where server access is not necessary or possible.

Special thanks go out to David Winslow for all the great work implementing all the new KML functionality.

This version has more than just improved Google Earth support.  GeoServer now has an official SQL Server extension (described previously). In addition, there is a new and improved Oracle extension which provides better performance and security from the previous version.

Further improving the visualization experience is GeoWebCache, a WMS tile-caching program.  Previously available as an extension (and still available as a standalone product), GeoWebCache is now built-in to GeoServer and can vastly accelerate map rendering.  We will be talking more about GeoWebCache in a future post.

Finally, this version includes a new drag and drop installer for Mac OS X users.

As always with any GeoServer release a heap of other improvements and bug fixes are included. A total of 98 issues were handled for this release.

We’re very excited about this release, and we encourage you to download, try it out, and let us know what you think. Comments and feedback are always welcome on the mailing list, as the community is always interested to hear how people are using GeoServer. Stay tuned for the 1.7.2 release, slated for release in the next month or so, which will include new breakthroughs in support for GeoSearch.

At this point the extension is still quite young and is missing some key features like spatial indexing and support for well known binary. By trying it out and providing us with feedback you can help drive development of these features.

The extension is based on the recent re-architecture in GeoTools for database backed data stores. Code named “JDBC Next Generation”, it provides a framework for building new data store implementations quickly and robustly. Also based on this architecture are soon to come improved extensions for MySQL, Oracle, and DB2. A new extension for SpatiaLite is also in the works.

Download the SQL Server extension and try it out. We are very eager to here any feedback on the mailing list. You can also help us make it better by reporting any issues in our bug tracker.