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

GeoServer 2.1.0 is shaping up to be quite an incredible step forward. In addition to all the great features of the first 2.1 beta, this release brings a few more.

Graphical File/Directory Chooser

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

Read more about the new file chooser.

Core improvements to support database-backed catalog

GeoServer’s core catalog interfaces received some tweaks to be able 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 which means it can not scale up to large amounts of layers. The support for specific new storage formats is still only available a community module, but these core improvements make it possible to more easily swap in and out different backends.

Read more about the improvements for database-backed catalog.

Font Improvements

Adding new fonts for your maps should now be much easier, as you can just drop font files directly in to your GeoServer data directory and they will be picked up by GeoServer.  The admin interface also will list the fonts currently available, including the ones picked up directly from the Java Virtual Machine.

Upgrade to Spring Security 2.0.6

GeoServer has always had Acegi Security as its core, but that library got absorbed by the Spring community, and improved and upgraded to become 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.  It also should be easier to customize security setup, with even more powerful options.

Read more about the upgrade to Spring Security.

WCS limits

WFS and WMS both have 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.

Web Processing Service (WPS) in extensions

The one thing to note from last beta release is that the WPS is maturing, It has been split up in to three modules, “core”, “web”, and “sextante”.  The latter has all the algorithms of the Sextante project, but is not yet mature, so it lives in a community module.  Web and core live in a new WPS extension, meaning that the core of WPS is now officially supported by GeoServer. You can find the WPS extension on the download page, and add it to GeoServer just like any other extension.

Read more about WPS in extensions.

And more

This release also included a number of other bug fixes and improvements.  Check out the entire changelog. Help us get to a stable 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. We appreciate any and all feedback. We’re hoping to move soon to Release Candidates, after getting one last major improvement in — WMS 1.3.

Download GeoServer 2.1-beta2

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 primary focus of version 2.0 is the new user interface. This interface addresses many suggestions for usability improvements, including paging and filtering of lists of information, batch removal of layers, and the elimination of the Submit-Apply-Save workflow.

Another particularly useful feature added since alpha2 was released is cascading delete. This feature allows a user to remove a workspace or a data store and have all the entities contained inside (such as layers) also be removed. Previously, it was necessary to delete all layers individually before being able to remove a data store. To prevent unintended deletion, a confirmation page details what will be removed.

As usual a host of other fixes and improvements (over 100!) have also been incorporated into this release. Please download, give it a try, and forward your feedback along.  We greatly appreciate reporting issues to the users mailing list and look forward to general feedback on the new user interface.