Slashgeo

Anonymous Voxel writes "The open source webmapping server GeoServer 1.5.3 has been released. According to GeosServer Blog [...] This version represents the culmination of a ton of hard work to make GeoServer more compatible with the new formats gaining great popularity in the rapidly expanding geo world. Foremost among the improvements is a number of advances in our support for Google Earth. KML, the format understood by Google Earth, has been available from GeoServer for awhile. But our implementation wasn’t flexible enough to make good looking maps and to take advantage of the advanced features of the format. That has all changed, with better default styling, custom placemarks from templates, support for ‘Super-Overlays’ and Time, and automatic generation of legend information. There is also experimental support for referencing an existing cache of tiles to use in a Super-Overlay. The ability to style one’s 2d map and get the same output in Google Earth has also improved dramatically, as it now picks up proper scale elements." The rest of the announcement below.

Chris Holmes writes "GeoServer 1.5.0-beta3 released. Details at http://blog.geoserver.org/2007/09/18/geoserver-16- beta3/" From the blog: "The main focus of this release has been a number of performance improvements, done by Andrea Aime. These center around the WMS, and can be seen most clearly on layers that do not have any labels. Soon we should improve the labeling as well, so keep an eye, since GeoServer is getting legitimately fast."

Still recovering from my recent accident I was not able to provide a timely coverage of last week's Free and Open Source Software for Geomatics (FOSS4G) 2007 conference in Victoria. With open source geospatial software being widely used nowadays, even by behemoths such as Google, Autodesk and ESRI, this conference is doubtlessly important. Here's a wrap up of the most interesting entries on the event that I could find, see also the previous related stories below. Let's start with the official program and OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell and Autodesk's Geoff Zeiss preemptive notes. If you have only time for one wrap up to read, here's Peter Batty's extensive review of FOSS4G 2007. From this entry: "The quality of the sessions I went to was consistently high, and there was a real energy and buzz around the whole event (much more than at most of the more established geospatial conferences I have been to recently). Adena Schutzberg said in her closing comments that her overall impression of the conference and the open source geospatial community was one of maturity [...]. The event reaffirmed the belief I had before coming here that the role of open source software in the geospatial industry will continue to grow quickly." All Points Blog offers an excellent coverage of the whole event, here's their entries: on the opening/lightning talks, tidbits I, tidbits II and exhibit highlights. Other entries include GeoServer news and tutorials, a short entry on an OpenLayers talk, Autodesk's announcement of code donation (covered last week), Andrew Turner's Beyond GPS slides, Archaeogeek one, two and three interesting accounts of the event. Update: 10/03 19:24 GMT by S : OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell just provided it's own overview of FOSS4G's success.

Fernando Quadro writes "Who is initiating in the development of space solutions is very common the following questioning: Which server of maps is best? MapServer or GeoServer? Looking for to answer this question, I wrote an article showing some of the differences between MapServer and GeoServer." Fernando's points are interesting, I invite readers to see the previous story on choosing between MapServer and MapGuide Open Source and read the informative comments. I also copied a few related stories below.

Late last December the Fuzzy Tolerance blog ran a nice demonstration of building a geoportal with open source software such as OpenLayers, TileCache, GeoServer, PostGIS, jQuery, REST and AJAX. Here's the resulting geospatial portal. From the blog: "From a developer’s perspective, the biggest advantages I’ve found with OpenLayers-Tilecache-jQuery-REST is speed and simplicity. The beta site went from an empty text file to release in only a few weeks of actual development time nestled in between other projects, with a lot of that taken up by a jQuery/OpenLayers/GeoServer/SLD learning curve, design, web service work, software setup, etc. It is also marvelously simple, being nothing more than Javascript and HTML. From an end-user perspective, you get a much more responsive application, a nicer map interface than I usually give people via OpenLayers, and everything is free and open source." I copied below some of the previous Slashgeo stories regarding the software used in the demonstration.