New GeoServer Blog

So I’ve been an extraordinarily negligent blogger of late, mostly due to my creative juices and writing energy going in to Openplans.org – the collaboration software we’re working on at TOPP. But I’m planning to spend some good time over the holidays writing up another queue of blog posts, and hopefully finishing off some of the ideas I started.

The main reason I’m writing now though is to point people at our new GeoServer blog, at http://blog.geoserver.org. We’re hoping it can find it’s voice as a useful resource for information, and I’ve seen a couple project blogs that I’ve liked of late. The main motivation is to be able to give people a chance to follow what all we’re up to on GeoServer without having to dive in to the mailing lists. Our lists are getting quite a bit of traffic, and indeed even there it’s sometimes hard to figure out the big things people are working on, since it’s much more the details that get discussed. So we’ll be getting developers and users to give updates on what they’re working on, in and around GeoServer. We’re also hoping to use the blog to give useful hints and tricks, to highlight portions of the documentation. The docs have become quite detailed, to the point where it can be easy to miss interesting features. We’ll also announce releases and post new tutorials on the blog. It should hopefully serve as a low commitment way to keep up with what all our community is up to. If anyone has suggestions for topics they’d like to see covered in the blog let us know.

As for what else is going on, the thing that’s exciting me is Andrea’s work on Versioning WFS. It’s still in a very experimental stage, but I think it’s got great potential to become a very important piece in bringing architectures of participation to geospatial data (a thread which I hope to finish up, at least in blog drafts, over christmas). I’ve also really been digging the work of the guys at OpenLayers. TileCache is particularly nice, a great specialized tool that takes on one job and does it well. We’ve just released GeoServer 1.4.0, with the goal of moving to a modular, plug-in type architecture – my dream is that we’d be able to make something like TileCache that could be both stand alone and a couple clicks to install it as a plug-in on the GeoServer base. There has also been some exciting work around the edges of openlayers with a vector editing demo that backends on WFS-T, which would be really great, especially if we could combine with our versioning improvements.

About these ads