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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04.15.08
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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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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03.17.08
Posted in Announcements at 4:30 pm by Chris Holmes
Though he’s already snuck in a blog post, I want to give a warm welcome to Mike Pumphrey, the new ‘outreach engineer’ at TOPP, who we’re going to see a lot more of on this blog. His role is still being defined, but he’s basically here as a resource to the community, to help out with documentation, to welcome new users, to manage releases, to create compelling demos, to make announcements, and much, much more. In time he’ll also be leading up commercial quality web and telephone support around GeoServer, and creating mapping applications for clients. But he’ll always be available to help out on irc (where he is known as bmmpxf) and on the email lists, so help him out as he gets up to speed, and soon he’ll be helping you out.
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03.14.08
Posted in Announcements at 2:38 pm by arneke
Just a quick shout: The .war for GeoWebCache 0.7.0 was accidentally compiled using a mixture of Java versions and was therefore quietly replaced with 0.7.1 the same morning. Since then Andrea and Jason have been busy reporting bugs, most of which have been closed. Updates include the return of JAI, support for vendor specific parameters in the configuration files, and image/png8 support. So without further ado, GeoWebCache 0.7.2.
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03.12.08
Posted in Announcements at 11:12 pm by arneke
GeoWebCache 0.7.1 is out on SourceForge. There was an issue with the WAR file, so the release has been bumped by .1 since last night. The actual code diff to 0.6.0 is 3746 lines (excluding openlayers and the formatter.xml), so there is a substantial number of changes under the hood. One of the main things is that layers now have a grid parameter and a bounding box. The grid should be the maximum extent of the coordinate system and is used to calculate the internal grid, and which is directly reflected in the cache keys. Separating these two means that you can later expand or reduce the bounds of the layer, and cached tiles will still work.
Other changes include:
- Support for multiple WMS backends per layer, queried in round robin fashion with automatic failover
- Microsoft Virtual Earth tiling support
- Google Maps tiling support
- Improved handling of layer bounds, give a rough estimate and it will approximate to closest metatile for all zoom levels
- Ability to run Jetty directly in Eclipse
- Some code cleanup, using GeoTools coding standard now (almost)
- Reduced JCS dependecies (berkeleydb,hsqldb,mysql), thereby cutting download in half
- Included configuration files and OpenLayers clients for topp:states, for testing
- Various bugfixes
The keen observer will note that this has very little to do with the features originally scheduled for 0.7, but it’s a lot of improvements nonetheless. Please make sure to revisit the configuration notes in the wiki since a number of things, including names of configuration parameters, have changed.
I have noticed that a number of people have reported problems with data in SRSs different from EPSG:4326 and EPSG:900913. Note that the the WMS Tiling Recommendations do not cover other reference systems, but we would be happy to look at them if you supply data and a little bit of your time.
Looking ahead we want to branch out in two separate directions. On one hand we want to integrate more tightly with GeoServer, which was originally planned for this release, on the other hand there appears to be demand to support other backends than WMS. While these are in no way mutually exclusive, supporting other backends would require some internal rewiring (Andrea Aime has suggested the Spring framework, which is also used in GeoServer and in many other high profile projects). Feel free to voice your opinion, especially if you are inclined to contribute in one way or the other.
QA is also becoming a serious concern at this point. Version 0.7.1 includes 18 unit tests that exercise the internal grid / metatiling system a fair bit, and it includes configuration files and OpenLayer clients for testing topp:states (loaded from a remote server) with EPSG:900913 and EPSG:4326. This is not enough, other parts of the system require additional tests, and functional ones to test the package as a whole, but it’s a start.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed patches and feedback, I look forward to hearing from you.
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