The release of a new major version update is a big deal (the last one was 11 months ago) and, while you may have heard about some of the new features on the developer list, here they are all in one place:

Referencing

• NTv2 and NADCon Support allows for datum transformations with cm level precision (instead of the usual 4m, when all goes well). Both will activate only if the grid files are present in the data dir, so by default the mere presence of the method is harmless, but generally speaking this is very good news for whoever needs to increase reprojection accuracy. Thanks to Andrea Aime and Oscar Fonts.
  
• A new reprojection console allows users to make sure the transformations are actually using the grids by picking two coordinate systems and transforming a single point back and forth. Thanks Andrea.
• Better support for un-referenced data with the new EPSG:40400 code that identifies a coordinate system made up of a generic 2D Cartesian plane.

Data access

• Database-level security implements the ability to use DBMS session startup and teardown scripts to alter user access the database during a specific request while falling back on connection pooling when the request is complete. Thanks to Astrium GEO-Information Services for sponsoring GeoSolutions to make this improvement.
• Sorting and paging is now available in all WFS versions (in 1.0 and 1.1 as a vendor param) via the sortBy and startIndex/maxFeature parameters. Thanks to Justin Deoliveira and Andrea.
• A new experimental OGR data store provides access to  a rich set of readable formats without needing special bridge libraries.
• The image collection coverage store allows users to serve un-referenced data through WMS using image/pixel space as the coordinate system. Thanks to SFMTA for sponsoring OpenGeo to complete this work.

Security

• A major retrofit of the GeoServer security subsystem adding support for a number of new authentication mechanisms including LDAP, digest and X.509 certificate authentication, and more. These improvements also includes the addition of user groups. This is a continuation of work started by Christian Mueller as a Google Summer of Code project;  thanks to NOAA for sponsoring OpenGeo to help Christian and Justin bring it to completion.

Web Feature Source (WFS)

• Support for WFS 2.0 adds some interesting new capabilities to the WFS protocol such as paging, stored queries, and extended operators. Thanks to IGN France for sponsoring OpenGeo to make this improvement.

Web Map Service (WMS)

• Support for additional dimensions brings time and elevation support to both vector and raster data. And, with support for time, comes support for animation in WMS. Thanks to Andrea on both counts.
• Rendering transformations provide a bridge between WPS and WMS and allow for very powerful visualization capabilities for processing through normal WMS. Thanks again, Andrea.

Web Processing Service (WPS)

• New WPS features include support for asynchronous process execution and a variety of new processes.

Virtual Services

• Virtual services allow GeoServer to support the notion of multitenancy, enabling a single GeoServer instance to publish multiple service endpoints. Thanks to NOAA for sponsoring OpenGeo to complete this improvement and a special thanks to Micah Wengren of NOAA for his leadership on the project.
• Workspace local settings allow for specifying service settings such as contact information,  proxy settings, and output format settings on a per workspace basis.
• Styles and layer groups can also now be defined on a per workspace basis.

GeoWebCache

• A GeoWebCache configuration GUI is now available directly from within the GeoServer web admin interface, including: the ability to define new grid sets, specify which layers to cache, seed or truncate the cache, and more. Big thanks to Gabriel and the GeoWebCache team for furthering improving integration between GeoWebCache in GeoServer.

Wow! And that isn’t even everything, many other bug fixes and improvements have made it into the 2.2 series as well.

Everyone who uses GeoServer should have at least one or two items in the above list to be excited about. Download GeoServer 2.2-beta, try it out, and please provide feedback and report any issues on the GeoServer mailing list.  As with any beta version, be sure to backup your data directory before upgrading.

FOSS4G North America

Be sure to catch Andrea and Justin’s State of GeoServer and What’s new in GeoServer 2.2 presentations at FOSS4G North America to learn more about the exciting new features in GeoServer 2.1 and GeoServer 2.2. The conference takes place in Washington DC from April 10 through April 12 and on-site registration is available on a first come first serve basis for $350.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

Download GeoServer 2.2-beta

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!

• The ability to mark a layer as “non advertised”. Layers flagged this way won’t appear in the capabilities document, making it a good way to add a layer group without having to tell the world about the layers included in it, and for any ”work in progress” or temporary layer that the administrator does not want the world to see.
• The imagemosaic-jdbc extension learned to load raster data from PostGIS 2.0 WKT raster. Mind, the support is pretty new and the configuration is not for the faint of heart, but we’re excited about this new developement and look forward to learn about how it works for you. Thanks to Christian Mueller for working on this.

We would also like to thank some GeoServer users that went the extra mile and contributed code and documentation patches for this release:

• Lucas Heezen for contributing a REST configuration flag that allows to filter out geometryless feature types from a store (GEOS-4741)
• John Hudson for adding the “ISO 19115:2003″ as a type option in Layer Metadata URL (GEOS-4595)
• German Osin for making sure stores are workspace qualified in REST config feature type list (GEOS-4772)
• Milton Jonathan for fixing an issue occurring in REST config when switching a layer from one store to another (GEOS-4740)
• Tony Young for a automatic configuration of SRS and bounds when publishing a layer via REST config (GEOS-4596)
• Tim Schaub for fixing a double encoding issue in WFS exception reporting (GEOS-4680)
• David Collins for a number of improvements to the user guide

Contributions like these help keep GeoServer responsive to the needs of our community and allow us to continue providing a stable and useful product. Thank you!
Thanks also go to GeoSolutions for sponsoring this release.

Please download GeoServer 2.1.2, try it out, and provide feedback on the mailing list. Your feedback helps GeoServer to continue to improve.

• Rudi Hochmeister has contributed a patches to our logging system to simplify debugging and to fix a number of issues in our developer documentation.
• Gianni Barrotta, Andrea Di Nora, and Pietro Arena have contributed a number of new WPS processes to the project.
• Robert Coup has identified inconsistencies in the handling of URLs in the KML and GeoRSS output formats and has contributed patches to bring those in line with the rest of the code base.
• Matt Bertrand has added support for the definition of character set during shapefile uploads and associated testing.

Contributions like these help keep GeoServer responsive to the needs of our community and allow us to continue providing a stable and useful product. Thank you! Thanks also go to LISAsoft for sponsoring this release. Please download GeoServer 2.1.1, try it out, and provide feedback on the mailing list. Your feedback helps GeoServer to continue to improve.

The current stable series, 2.1.x, will remain on Java 5, giving people stuck on the old JDK at the very least another six months of support.

We’d like to hear your opinion on this move. Let us know by voting on the user poll:

http://www.micropoll.com/a/mpview/1076733-423614

Thanks for your participation!

GeoSolutions, an italian company deeply involved in both GeoServer and GeoTools, is looking for a GeoServer developer that will code new features as well as install and manage production sites. GeoSolutions is also looking for a front-end developer that will develop the user facing portion of new geo-spatial applications powered by GeoServer.

Searches on indeed.com, dice.com or monster.com also show a number of positions that either demand or have a preference for people with GeoServer experience, picking a few examples among the list:

• OpenGeo is seeking a Project Manager
• Two GIS web developer jobs in the VA area
• GIS web developer at the Stanford University libraries
• Maps and GIS senior engineer

We’re please to see this growth and hope you’ll enjoy working with GeoServer as much as we do!

The release of a new major version update is a big deal (the last one was 18 months ago), and while we’ve talked about all of the new features that have been incrementally showing up, let’s put them all together here in one place:

WMS Cascading

Something many users have asked for since the very addition of WMS support is cascading, the ability of GeoServer to proxy for another remote WMS server (be it GeoServer, MapServer, or ArcGIS). 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.

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. Thanks to virtual services, one can create multiple service endpoints within a single GeoServer instance. Special thanks to Landgate for funding this work.

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, join two tables together, or generate column values on the fly with a function. Before this feature, the recommendation was to create a view, yet views can be a maintenance burden and are at times problematic.

Now one can create a layer directly from an SQL query and query definitions can be parameterized to create dynamic queries on the fly. These parameters can be restricted with regular expressions to prevent an SQL injection security hole.

Special thanks to Andrea Aime for spending much of his personal time on this one and to OBIS for providing the funding for the parametric component of the work.

Web Processing Service (WPS)

With 2.1 and the arrival of WPS we welcome a new OGC service into GeoServer. 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 ranging from buffering a geometry to more complex processes such as image processing.

Historically, GeoServer has been focused on data delivery and did not provide tools for performing analysis on 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.

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 may alleviate the need for multiple scale-dependent rendering rules and may greatly simplify complex SLD documents.

Special thanks to Milton Jonathan and Tecgraf/PUC-Rio for 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 support from SWECO and Malmö City of Sweden.

DPI Scaling

GeoServer renders images at a resolution of 90 DPI by default. While this is acceptable for most standard screen resolutions, it is unacceptable for higher-resolution printed materials. Now it is possible to supply a format option to a WMS request to control the DPI setting on the fly.

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

Graphical File/Directory Chooser

Ever found it difficult to remember the full path when loading a shapefile or GeoTIFF?  This new improvement brings an easy graphical file and directory selection tool for browsing the file system on which GeoServer resides. This is definitely a great enhancement to make GeoServer even easier to configure.

Core improvements to support a database-backed catalog

GeoServer’s core catalog interfaces received some tweaks to more easily support different backend storage formats. The current in-memory implementation has a number of drawbacks—the most notable being that it is memory-bound, meaning it cannot scale to accomodate large numbers of layers. Support for specific new storage formats is still only available as a community module but these core improvements make it possible to more easily swap between different backends.

Font Improvements

Adding new fonts to maps should now be much easier, as one can drop font files directly into the GeoServer data directory and have them be recognized by GeoServer. The admin interface will list all fonts that are currently available, including those made available by the Java Virtual Machine.

Upgrade to Spring Security 2.0.6

GeoServer has always had Acegi Security at its core but since that library was absorbed by the Spring community it has been improved and upgraded into Spring Security, the official security module of the Spring portfolio. This brings a number of new security protocols to GeoServer, including OpenID and Windows NTLM. With even more powerful options, it should now be easier to customize the security setup.

WCS Limits

While WFS and WMS have both had the ability to limit what a user can request, now similar controls are in place for WCS calls as well. Thanks to MassGIS for funding this improvement.

WMS 1.3.0

WMS 1.3.0 is the newest version of the Web Map Service protocol. Special thanks to Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, for providing OpenGeo with funding to complete its implementation in GeoServer. With WMS 1.3 mandated by the INSPIRE Initiative, Ordnance Survey opted to fund the GeoServer project so that other organizations in the UK and the rest of Europe could meet their INSPIRE requirements and everyone across the globe could benefit.

SLD 1.1 / SE 1.1 enhancements

Though not every new option is fully-supported, it is now possible to use most SE 1.1 documents in GeoServer. User feedback on which new options should be supported 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.

GeoWebCache Integration

GeoWebCache integration allows 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 of OpenGeo for the great GeoWebCache improvements.

Improvements to RESTConfig

This release also brings some improvements to RESTConfig, which is now shipped with GeoServer by default. Improvements to the API include a 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 automatically converted into a PostGIS database and published as a PostGIS layer rather than as a Shapefile layer. The API also supports recursive DELETE operations, making it more convenient to remove resources that contain other resources such as stores or workspaces. Thanks to David Winslow and Justin Deoliveira of OpenGeo for these improvements.

Improved Raster Reprojection Performance

Thanks to some great work from GeoSolutions, raster reprojection performance has been significantly improved by using linear appoximations of transformation functions.

WCS Request Builder

Thanks to Andrea Aime, there is now a Web Coverage Service request builder  for graphically building WCS requests to test a coverage service. As clients for WCS have always been sparse, this tool goes a long way towards making the service more usable.

Run multiple GeoServer instances from a single data directory

There now exists 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 and prevent it from maintaining a lock on the data directory.

Tons of bug fixes

A new release wouldn’t be complete without bug fixes. Here is the full list of issues fixed.

Wow!

Everyone who uses GeoServer should have at least one or two items in the above list to be excited about. Download GeoServer 2.1.0, try it out, and please provide feedback and report any issues on the GeoServer mailing list.

Be sure to backup your data directory before upgrading, as with all GeoServer major version upgrades there will be changes to the data directory that will make it incompatible with 2.0.x. If using the aforementioned database-backed catalog, this should be easier than ever.

Thanks for using GeoServer!

Download GeoServer 2.1.0

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the fifth release candidate for 2.1, now available for download.

This release brings some bug fixes and addresses a few residual regressions compared to the old 2.0.x series. In no particular order:

• While GeoServer 2.1 uses extended CQL (ECQL) for all the CQL related activities, it now also preserve backwards compatibility with the old CQL language (in particular, new keywords in ECQL might have conflicted with valid CQL statements).
• The compatibility towards Google Earth 6 was improved too, making Google Earth 6 properly display KMZ files with embedded images.
• The querylayer module, allowing for cross layer filtering, was promoted from community to extension module and is thus available as an official extension in the release.
• Finally, GeoServer 2.1-RC5 avoids HTTP session creation on all OGC service paths, even when using basic authentication, providing better overall scalability.

Check out the change log for the full list.

Thanks to everyone who tested RC4 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 RC5. Be sure to report any issues in the bug tracker or on the mailing list. Unless new regressions or serious bugs are found RC5 will be re-released as 2.1.0 final.

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!