= MapServer Project Report for 2007-2008 = Presented at the 2008 OSGeo Annual General Meeting in Cape Town, October 2, 2008. == Progress on incubation == ... finally about ready to graduate == 5.2 release in July 2008 == * Nearly 200 tickets were closed as part of this effort. * Notable features and enhancements include: * MapServer users manual (docs wrapped into a single downloadable PDF) * Performance enhancements for large shapefile handling (following Geoserver comparison) * Performance enhancements for AGG rendering (an order of magnitude faster in some cases) * Rendering improvements: * fuzzy label outlines for AGG * style-level opacity for AGG * quantization and palette support for PNGs and RGBA modes * pre-clip label point computation (helps in tile generation) * OGC Web Services: * WCS 1.1.0 support (RFC-41) * SOS 1.0.0 support * WFS 1.1.0 support * Compliance testing (WMS 1.1.1 ready to certify) * proxy and http authentication support for cascaded WMS requests * Support for auth cookie forwarding (RFC-42) * Direct tile generation for Google Maps API (RFC-43) * Native Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Support (RFC-38) * extent (e.g. shpext, mapext) template tag attribute handling * Simplified Template Support for Query Output (MS RFC 36) * Thanks to all contributors (devs, docs, testers, $$). Special thanks to the USACE for funding lots of that work. == What's coming == * 5.4 release early 2009 * Tuning and performance optimizations * New features / enhancements: - WMS 1.3.0 - KML output - XML mapfile??? - Rendering enhancements: - fractional line width (0.5 pixel lines with AGG) - label positioning enhancements (following comparison with Geoserver) - and many others as detailed in RFC 45 - unified rendering API (merge GD, AGG, etc...), this is a *hopefully* pending GD 3.0 - label text transformations RFC 40 - hoping that a OpenGL renderer will be donated to the project??? - URL-based configuration expansion (RFC-44) - scale-dependent tile index support * Docs/demos - Docs: debugging and tuning guide - Work on a new website or improve existing site - New mapserver demo (based loosely on the OpenLayers functional demos) == Stats == * Number of members on lists: * users: 1843 * dev: 339 * Welcome 3 new committers: * Jeff !McKenna * Paul Ramsey * Alan Boudreault