Slashgeo

The OpenLayers mailing list announced the release of TileCache 1.4. From the announcement: "TileCache provides a Python-based WMS/TMS server, with pluggable caching mechanisms and rendering backends. In the simplest use case, TileCache requires only write access to a disk, the ability to run Python CGI scripts, and a WMS you want to be cached. With these resources, you can create your own local disk-based cache of any WMS server, and use the result in any WMS-C supporting client, like OpenLayers, or any TMS supporting client, like OpenLayers and worldKit." See also the OSGeo Tile Map Service specification.

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.

Not exactly news, but we never mentioned MapTiler, an open source map tile cutter, before. MapTiler is based on GDAL2Tiles, which was featured almost two years ago. From the MapTiler website: "MapTiler is graphical application for online map publishing. Your map can create overlay of standard maps like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft VirtualEarth or OpenStreetMap and can be also visualized in 3D form by Google Earth. Only thing you have to do for publishing the map is to upload the automatically generated directory with tiles into your webserver. Supported files for conversion: TIFF/GeoTIFF, MrSID, ECW, JPEG2000, Erdas HFA, NOAA BSB, JPEG and more..." I found out MapTiler from this entry named MapTiles, Pyramids, and DeepEarth. See related stories below, several pertinent previous tiling stories.

arneke writes "GeoWebCache 1.0, a WMS tile cache implemented as a Java Servlet, has been released. The program is very fast, cached tiles are usually returned in milliseconds and hundreds of clients can be served simultaneously on even modest hardware. It supports services such as Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth and Google Maps. Requests that are not GetMap are forwarded to the backend, making it easy to use existing clients.

It only needs a container like Apache Tomcat or Jetty and runs on any platform supported by Sun Java. It can easily be installed on Windows, Linux and Solaris. In addition to the usual bugfixes, this release includes a web front end that makes it easy to preview layers, seed the cache and reload the configuration. GeoWebCache supports two modes of configuration, you can either just provide a link to a WMS GetCapabilities document, or you can configure a layer in detail using an easy to grasp XML format. Multiple backends can be used for the same layer, they are queried in a round robin fashion with automatic failover.

GeoWebCache is a community project closedly affiliated with GeoServer and licensed under LGPLv3. The software is maintained by OpenGeo, but has benefited greatly from contributions by individuals and organizations, ranging from bug reports to patches. It has also received genereous contributions through Google Summer of Code, namely the predecessor jTileCache by Chris Whitney, and REST and XML improvements by Marius Suta." See also related stories below.

In a presentation named "Comparing the Performance of Open Source Web Map Servers", GeoServer 1.7 and MapServer 5.2 are benchmarked. From GeoServer entry: "This year, at FOSS4G 2008, Andrea Aime (also OpenGeo) took over the benchmarking process, this time with an updated test suite including thematic mapping, anti-aliasing, raster data, and tile caching. Since the previous year, MapServer had improved its shapefile rendering to be faster than GeoServer’s render time." If you were not convinced tile caching is important, now you will.

APB discuss a press release about MetaCarta's announcement of their Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP). MetaCarta are behind the open source OpenLayers, TileCache, FeatureServer and more. From APB's analysis: "In other words, you can separately license their API's but still have access to their geo-referencing engine. So, if you only want to use their geotagging or query parsings applications in conjunction with the underlying geo-referencing engine software developers will now be able to license them as they need them. In the past, the six modules (geotagging, query parsing, geosearch, location finder, save-search-notification, and document density) that comprised the MetaCarta platform were highly inter-related and did not work independently." See related stories below.

Stefano Costa writes "A List Apart has an interesting article by Paul Smith of EveryBlock about open source software for creating webmapping applications. From the article snapshot: "Rolling your own maps need not be an intimidating affair, provided you understand the problem and the tools to fix it."" I included below several related previous stories. Thanks Stefano for your submission.

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.

st_0x0ef writes "From openlayers.org : "After almost two weeks of work on OpenLayers, 2.5 featureset is finally starting to come together [...]

Some of the new features for OpenLayers 2.5:

• Better Vector Format Support, including GeoJSON in its current incarnation and better cross-browser XML parsing support.
• Better Feature Editing — with support for ‘virtual vertices’ a la Google My Maps for extending out a shape and keyboard support for removing vertices from it.
• Spherical Mercator support, to better support overlaying other data on top of commercial data sources. This means that vectors and TileCache over Google Maps baselayers will work.
• Regular Polygon drawing and creation: allowing users to specify a center, radius, and number of sides to create a polygon around an origin.

(Note that the above URLs are likely to change/go away as they move into trunk.)

Already in trunk for this release:

• Combination of gridded/untiled layers to limit code duplication
• NaturalDocs powered documentation: already up and running on the apidocs, this complete rewrite of OpenLayers documentation is a huge step forward.
• Debug support: In numerous places in the code, when a function can’t fail gracefully, it will now report to the user via the Firebug or Firebug Lite console when switched on.
• Rotating Vector Features
• Over 100 other bugfixes and minor changes to the OpenLayers code.

All in all, this release is going to bring together many of the small things that had been left over from the 2.4 release, and I’m looking forward to moving forward with many of the exciting new features."

This Friday's geonews cleanup. The ESRI Developer Summit 2009 is now done and there's a few wrap-ups on the geoblogs, here's one, more here. This was an occasion for Microsoft Virtual Earth and ESRI to announce a new partnership: "As part of ArcGIS Online at the ArcGIS 9.3.1 release, ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server users will be able to connect directly to Virtual Earth and quickly start their GIS projects with ready-to-use content." This is be doubtlessly useful to many ESRI users. Spatially Adjusted goes on with his presentation on using OpenLayers with ArcGIS Server REST API. Sean Gillies offers two entries on OGC's Web Map Tiling Service Standard. See also Spatially Adjusted on the topic. Along the same lines, the OGC announced the new Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) standard: "defines a protocol-independent language for the extraction, processing, and analysis of multi-dimensional gridded coverages" The Earth is Square details an ESA application that uses NASA World Wind Java for its Earth Observation Catalogue and Ordering Services. Finally, Vector One discusses if there's a geospatial future in the global economic downturn? Some related stories copied below.