GeoServer 2.7-RC1 Released
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>
The GeoServer team is pleased to announce the release of GeoServer
2.7-RC1 <http://geoserver.org/release/2.7-RC1/> with some great new
features. The download page for 2.7-RC1
<http://geoserver.org/release/2.7-RC1/> provides links for zip
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoserver/files/GeoServer/2.7-RC1/geoserver-2.7-RC1-bin.zip>,
war
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoserver/files/GeoServer/2.7-RC1/geoserver-2.7-RC1-war.zip>,
dmg
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoserver/files/GeoServer/2.7-RC1/geoserver-2.7-RC1.dmg>,
and exe
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoserver/files/GeoServer/2.7-RC1/geoserver-2.7-RC1.exe>
bundles. As a release candidate, 2.7-RC1 is considered experimental and
is provided for testing purposes. This release is not recommended for
production (even if you are enthusiastic about the new features).
This release is made in conjunction with GeoTools 13-RC1 and GeoWebCache
1.7-RC1. Thanks to Ben Caradoc-Davies <mailto:[email protected]>
(Transient Software, New Zealand <http://transient.nz/>) for making this
release, Kevin Smith (Boundless <http://boundlessgeo.com/>) for
releasing GeoWebCache 1.7-RC1, Jody Garnett (Boundless
<http://boundlessgeo.com/>) for building the dmg and testing, and a big
thanks to Andrea Aime (GeoSolutions <http://www.geo-solutions.it/>) for
gathering up the contents (and pictures) for this blog post, which is
based almost entirely on his post announcing the release of 2.7-beta.
A complete change log
<http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10311&version=20940>
since 2.7-beta is available from the issue tracker.
Please Download and Test
The committers have a great release for you to look forward to, we would
like to ask you to *download and test*. By trying GeoServer out on a
wide range of platforms and datasets we can all help the next release be
great.
/Testing is a key part of the open source social contract
<http://www.how2map.com/2013/09/opensource-and-social-contract.html>. This
is your best chance to identify issues early while we still have
time to do something about it. If you make use of commercial support
<http://geoserver.org/support/> ask your vendor about their plans
for 2.7-RC1 testing./
When testing Geoserver 2.7-RC1 please let us know on the user list
<http://geoserver.org/comm/> how it works for you. We will be sure to
thank you in the final release announcement and product presentations.
New Features
Color composition and blending
Color composition and blending are two new extensions to SLD allowing
the web map styler to control how overlapping layers in a map are merged
together. Beyond the simple stacking and translucency control a wide
range of effects are now possible by allowing masking and specific color
operations for blending layers together in new ways.
A common well known example is a polygon thematic map on top of a DEM,
which tends to provide under-par results using only transparency
control, but generates very appealing ones when using the “multiply”
blending mode:
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/01/22/geoserver-2-7-beta-released/dem-multiply/>
Alpha masking also allows for neat cartographic tricks, like the one
below, where the polygon fill has been cut at the border of the states
generating a “inner line” effect:
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/01/22/geoserver-2-7-beta-released/nurc-naturalearthraster_nurc-states-3/>
Check out the documentation for a list of supported operations and some
examples
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/styling/sld-extensions/composite-blend.html>.
We would like to thank Cleveland Metroparks
<http://www.clevelandmetroparks.com/> for sponsoring this improvement.
WPS Clustering
GSIP 119
<https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP%20119%20WPS%20clustering%20of%20asynchronous%20requests>
added support for asynchronous requests over a cluster of GeoServer
instances. In WPS an asynchronous request starts by returning the client
a URL that can be polled in order to know about the execution progress,
and eventually to retrieve the final results. Previous to 2.7-beta the
status information was kept in memory, thus only the GeoServer instance
running the process could meaningfully respond to a poll from the
client. With GeoServer 2.7-beta a new extension point allows the
programmer to create a process status repository that can be shared
among the GeoServer instances.
The first default implementation of the shared repository is a Hazelcast
based one
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/extensions/wps/hazelcast-clustering.html>,
leveraging in-memory, replicated and distributed maps to share the state
information, while the results (which can be pretty large) are stored in
a shared file system. The community is welcome to develop other variants
that could store the information in other places, for example, a
relational database, a nosql one, or in the cloud (e.g., S3 storage).
WPS Security
GSIP 121 <https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP-121> added
the ability to provide fine grained access control to processes based on
our usual role based authentication system: each process or group of
processes can be associated to a list of roles that can access them,
while other users will be disallowed seeing or accessing the same processes.
[See blog for screenshot
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>]
WPS Limits
Integrating with the security, GSIP 123
<https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP%20123%20WPS%20input%20and%20execution%20limits>
added support for process execution limits, bringing WPS up to par with
the other OGC services in terms of limiting the resources used by a
single request. In the main WPS panel one can now configure how much
processing time to give synchronous and asynchronous requests:
[See blog for screenshot
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>]
Also, in the new process security page one can configure a global limit
for the size of complex inputs (see above), it is also possible to
configure limits on a process by process basis, in order to restrict the
size of inputs, the range of numerical values, and the multiplicity of
repeatable inputs, to constrain the effort of a WPS process call. All
these limits will be dutifully reflected in the DescribeProcess output.
[See blog for screenshot
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>]
If you’re not satisfied with the above limits and would like to develop
new ones, no worries, the current code is setup on a pluggable
WPSInputValidator extesion point that will allow you to create new types
of input validators.
WPS Dismiss
The final Finally, GSIP 122
<https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP%20122%20Dismissing%20WPS%201.0%20process%20execution>
added the ability to dismiss an ongoing process from the client that
requested the execution, or as an administrator. The new Dismiss
operation comes from the WPS 2.0 specification, which GeoServer does not
support yet, so it has to be seen as a vendor extension to WPS 1.0,
which leverages the executionId parameter returned in the asynch status
links to allow execution cancellation, you can read more about it in the
user documentation
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/extensions/wps/operations.html#dismiss>.
The administrator instead gets a new user interface panel showing the
currently running operations, allowing selection and forceful dismissal
of processes that are running:
[See blog for screenshot
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>]
The user guide
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/extensions/wps/administration.html#process-status-page>
contains more details about its usage. We would like to thank NATO STO
CMRE <http://www.cmre.nato.int/> for sponsoring all the above WPS
improvements.
Refresh of the CSS module
The initial CSS extension (responsible for using CSS to generate SLD
styles) was written in Scala. Although wildly popular, and featured up
until GeoServer 2.6, the module has not been maintained to the level
expected of a GeoServer extension.
Andrea has taken it unto himself to address this gap, rewriting the
functionality in Java and making the result available to the GeoTools
library.
The new CSS engine performs the same function as the Scala original and
has managed to make a few key improvements. In particular the Java
implementation can efficiently handle large CSS files without bogging
down with minutes of translation time.
[See blog for screenshot
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>]
The user interface for the CSS editor has also been revamped a bit,
making better usage of available screen space, and sporting syntax
highlighting and formatting thanks to CodeMirror. This change addresses
a common gripes correctly supporting relative images (the generated SLD
preserves the relative path) and polygon with strokes are now translated
to a single polygon symbolizer (to the benefit of GetLegendGraphic
calls). Finally, you’ll notice that the download size have been
significantly trimmed, as we don’t need anymore the Scala runtime.
The new translator has been tested against a few hundreds CSS styles
already, but of course it’s new, so it’s of paramount importance that
you test your own styles, and let us know if you notice any regression.
We take the occasion to thank David Window for creating the initial CSS
module, and Andrea Aime for porting it to java and acting as the new
maintainer.
Relative time support in WMS/WCS
As you probably knows GeoServer supports time based filtering in both
WMS (aka WMS-T) and WCS (as part of WCS-EO). Up until now you had to
specify the desired time either as an absolute value, e.g.
&time=2011-05-02, or as an absolute range of values,
e.g. &time=2011-05-02/2011-05-05.
The work done in GSIP 124
<https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP-124> adds support for
a vendor specific extension to the time syntax which allows the
specification of relative times, e.g., the last 36 hours,
“PT36H/PRESENT”, or the day after December 25 2012,
“2010-12-25T00:00:00.0Z/P1D”.
This allows for more compact requests, but more importantly, it allows
to generate stable, publishable links to instants or intervals relative
to the present server time, e.g., the weather forecast for tomorrow, two
days and three days in the future, or the temperature maps for the last
three days, maybe in a KML document generated with animations over time.
Miscellaneous
In addition a wide range of improvements have been made:
* For those making printed maps, we added a newvendor parameter
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/services/wms/vendor.html#scalemethod>
forcing GeoServer to ignore the WMS simple scale computation
algorithm, and run a local and accurate one instead, resulting in
better integration between printing requirements and maps with scale
dependencies.
* The flow-control module now also supports rate based rules
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/extensions/controlflow/index.html#per-user-rate-control>,
with the ability to slow down, or simply reject, requests that are
incoming from a specific client at an excessive rate.
* For those working at the dateline, you’ll be pleased to know that
the WCS 2.0 GetCoverage requests can now handle bounding boxes
crossing the dateline, and they will take the two halves of your
coverage from the antipodes, merge them together in a single output
file that will be returned to you (much like the same support for
WMS, introduced in 2.6.0).
* For people using configuration in the database, the JDBCConfig
module and core modules have seen a number of changes to increase
scalability and push down into the database as much filtering as
possible in a larger number of commonly used code paths.
* The DDS module, allowing extraction of DEM portions using the WMS
protocol in order to feed Nasa Worldwind, has seen a number of fixes
and now allows the specification of a texture compression format.
* Finally, the map preview has been switched to OpenLayers 3, although
the nostalgic can get back the OL2 based one by adding the
“-DENABLE_OL3=false” parameter to the JVM startup options. Thanks to
Bart for helping add this to GeoServer.
This concludes the most visible changes, if you are missing some please
check the full changelog
<http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10311&version=20940>
for details, there is quite a bit more stuff in there.
Community modules
In addition to the core GeoServer and extensions we have an active
community area for experiments and new volunteers. This release comes
with a number of new community modules that you might find useful.
Clustering modules
The community section now holds two clustering modules allowing a
cluster of GeoServer instances to work against a shared vision of the
data directory.
The first one, contributed by GeoSolutions, works using J2EE JMS
messages to share the state against the various nodes, and allows the
usage of the normal file based configuration, either in a shared data
dir mode, or data dir per node mode. This is know as the “JMS
clustering”, see the documentation
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/community/jms-cluster/index.html>
for more details. The module is ready for testing as it’s part of the
nightly builds
<http://ares.boundlessgeo.com/geoserver/master/community-latest/>.
The second one, contributed by Boundless, works by using Hazelcast
distributed messages, and it’s designed to work best against the
JDBConfig module. At this time there are no released artifacts or
documentation, but the adventurous user will find it pretty easy to
figure out.
GeoFence
The GeoFence advanced security subsystem has been donated to the
GeoServer project by GeoSolutions earlier this year, this module is the
plugin connecting a GeoServer instance to the GeoFence rule engine.
GeoFence allows to setup complex security rules and leverage the full
power of the underlying GeoServer security subsystem, for example, it’s
possible to establish security rules mixing in the same condition data
and service being used, limit attributes available to certain
users/operations, filter data so that certain records are not visible to
the public, force certain default style to given user roles, and so on.
The GeoFence wiki <https://github.com/geoserver/geofence/wiki> contains
documentation on how to use and configure the system.
SOLR data store
The SOLR data store allows GeoServer to connect to a SOLR server and
publish its spatial document via the OGC protocols, efficiently making
maps, serving them via the WFS service, and allowing spatial analysis
via WPS. The user interface allows to classify sets of documents as
layers, and map the document variable structure into the fixed structure
of simple feature types served by GeoServer.
[See blog for screenshot
<http://blog.geoserver.org/2015/02/21/geoserver-2-7-rc1-released/>]
You can read an introduction in this blog post
<http://www.geo-solutions.it/blog/solr-power-shining-through-geoserver-ogc-services/>,
and delve into details in the user documentation
<http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/community/solr/index.html>.
New WPS output formats
The gs-gpx and gs-kml modules offer two new PPIO to translate feature
collection resulting off WPS processes in the respective formats. The
KML one, in particular, also supports limited input parsing, allowing to
send KML documents as inputs to the WPS services.
The WPS download process
The wps-download community module forms the basis of an “advanced clip
and ship” tool that allows a client to ask for data in a specific area,
eventually reprojecting it, estimate the download size, and allow the
preparazion of a zip package with the desired data, all via asynchronous
calls, providing a good replacement for WFS/WCS when the amount of data
to be extracted is too large to be delivered via synchronous HTTP calls.
About GeoServer 2.7
Articles and resources for GeoServer 2.7 series:
* *SOLR power shining through GeoServer OGC services
<http://www.geo-solutions.it/blog/solr-power-shining-through-geoserver-ogc-services/>*
--
Ben Caradoc-Davies <[email protected]>
Software Engineer
Transient Software <http://transient.nz>
New Zealand
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