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 USACE for funding lots of that work.

What's coming

• 5.4 release early 2009
• Tuning and performance optimization
• Features:
  • 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
  • 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