Participants
Representatives from the following companies have confirmed attendance and sponsorship:

• OpenGeo
• Camptocamp
• terrestris
• Mapgears

These organizations have provided core developers for GeoExt 1.x and have experience as service providers building applications with ExtJS 4. We’re excited to work with them again as we help develop GeoExt 2.0

Sponsor search
A week-long gathering of eight developers calls for a budget of $52,000. This covers travel, accommodations and partly the developers themselves. While much of this cost is being borne by the participating organizations we have not been able to close the gap.

We are looking for sponsors to help. Sponsors will be named explicitly and are encouraged to input their priorities for desired functionality in GeoExt 2.0.

Call for sponsorship
The participating organizations would like to invite all organizations and users utilizing GeoExt to sponsor the code sprint. Becoming a sponsor ensures the benefits from the new functions that will be implemented.

The OpenGeo team is excited to announce the release of OpenGeo Suite 2.4.4. This is the first new version in a few months so there have been lots of stability improvements and updates.

GeoServer incorporates the new features from the recently released GeoServer 2.1.3. It now has Basic HTTP authentication for cascaded WMS servers, a feature that has been asked for by a number of our clients. GeoServer also has support for non-advertised layers, with layers configured and active, yet not publicized in the capabilities documents. For our European friends, we’ve made enhancements to the View Service for the GeoServer INSPIRE extension.

The GeoServer-embedded GeoWebCache now has a significantly improved UI, exposing many options previously only configurable via a text editor. It’s now possible to add a new layer, configure tile size, view disk quotas, enable GWC services and cache formats.

GeoExplorer has improved stability when deployed under Glassfish and WebSphere containers. Logout functionality has now been exposed, based on many user requests. In general, GeoExplorer now has a faster loading of JavaScript resources.

The OpenGeo Suite is and continues to be 100% open source and we’ve migrated the source code onto GitHub to improve our development process and make it easier for anyone to check out our source code.

We invite everyone to check out our new release—register for a trial of the Enterprise Edition or download the free (but unsupported) Community Edition. If you’re looking for support, unlimited bug fixes, access to core developers, updates, telephone support, and even custom development hours, we invite you to consider becoming an OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition client.

Thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports and feature requests. Thanks as well to all developers involved in our component projects. Finally, thanks to our current Enterprise Edition clients, who enable to us to continue to develop the best geospatial software.

The OpenGeo Suite team has migrated all of our source code over to Git from Subversion, and we are now hosting the code on GitHub. This follows the trend of lots of open source software projects toward a distributed version control system.

Switching from Subversion to Git has all sorts of benefits for the development team, as well for anyone interested in playing with the code. There are numerous sites that detail the advantages of Git (we particularly like this one), but it will allow us to more easily incorporate features for our clients, manage multiple release streams, and work simultaneously without breaking development for everyone else. As the client base of the OpenGeo Suite grows (and as more and more people download the free Community Edition) this change has been a long time in coming.

You can also visit OpenGeo’s main GitHub repository as well as the main repositories for GeoExplorer, GXP, and more. Please fork the code and play around. If you have patches, feel free to send us a pull request. While we can’t guarantee that all patches will be accepted, we value every suggestion we receive.

If you have thoughts about our svn to git conversion, we’d love to hear about in the comments section. Though please, no x-is-better-than-y wars. Each one of us is correct!

OpenGeo is evaluating offering training sessions for GIS instructors at colleges and universities. If you are affiliated with an academic institution, please answer the following questions so we can gauge interest. This form is intended to be filled out by GIS users and instructors in academica.

Last month, a few of us at OpenGeo attended the GEOINT Symposium in San Antonio where, for the first time, open source received some serious attention. There were two panels on open source technologies and multiple keynote addresses highlighting the benefits of open source and the need to reduce software licensing costs.

Our COO, Eddie Pickle, sat on a panel moderated by John Scott, Co-Chairman of RadiantBlue and Dr. Christopher Tucker, USGIF Board Member. He used the opportunity to offer his thoughts on open source geospatial technologies and discuss open source adoption. Eddie highlighted the TsuDAT project as an example of a collaborative, open source GeoNode application. Zoom ahead to 38:00 minutes in the video below to see Eddie discuss OpenGeo’s experiences developing, deploying, and supporting open source solutions.

The video also offers some interesting perspectives from other panelists who discussed their experiences implementing and using open source technologies. Questions start at 58:00 minutes, enjoy.

We’ve done it again! Five of the OpenGeo workshops at FOSS4G have sold out. This response has us even more excited for this year’s conference.

• Introduction to PostGIS, Paul Ramsey and Sam Smith
• Web Mapping with GeoServer, Mike Pumphrey
• OpenLayers Application Development, Tim Schaub
• Developing OGC Compliant Web Applications With GeoExt, Andreas Hocevar
• A Complete Open Source Web Mapping Stack, Alyssa Wright and Ian Schneider

Don’t worry, there are still plenty of opportunities at FOSS4G to learn about OpenGeo. Tickets are still available for the Opening Data with GeoNode workshop, and for more in depth discussions, there’s always our Meet The Experts sessions.

Outside of Denver there are other opportunities to meet OpenGeo team members. This week, Eddie Pickle will be at the MIL-OSS conference in Atlanta to discuss GeoNode, and its collaborative abilities. If you’re in the Atlanta area and want to find out about GeoNode, or how the military is using open source technologies it will be a worthwhile conference to attend.

Later in September we’ll be attending the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) annual conference, followed by exhibiting at GEOINT in October.

Will you be attending these conferences? Want to set to set up a meeting, become a partner, or get involved in open-source communities? Contact us to find out more. The schedules are filling up quickly!

Hope to see you out there.

OpenGeo recently added support for Teradata Geospatial to GeoServer, allowing full read and write capabilities to the database including the viewing, editing, and deleting of spatial features. The Teradata extension for GeoServer has been optimized specifically for Teradata databases, including support for Query Banding and Tessellation. With this added functionality, GIS and other visualization tools can interoperate with Teradata spatial data in real-time via standard web services.

The article, GeoServer and Teradata - Your Geospatial Data Served on the Web, authored by OpenGeo, provides step-by-step instructions on how to download, install, and configure GeoServer with Teradata. It also contains considerations specific to the Teradata database regarding configuration and set-up instructions. We also included how to connect popular visualization tools such as Google Earth and uDig to GeoServer to view and edit features in Teradata.

• GeoServer and Teradata - Your Geospatial Data Served on the Web
• GeoServer documentation - Teradata in GeoServer

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re happy to announce the release of OpenGeo Suite 2.4.3!

For the first time ever, we’re releasing the Enterprise and Community editions of the OpenGeo Suite simultaneously. We’re even updating our Cloud offerings on both Skygone and Amazon Web Services. Aligning our release process to account for all tiers seems to be a sensible step, and one that we have been working toward for a while behind the scenes.

So what’s the difference? Glad you asked. The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition comes with valuable add-ons for administrators, such as Suite Analytics for graphically viewing and managing server load. No need to go digging through the logs when you can get a report of all the failed requests right in your browser. You can even see where your requests are originating from, due to an embedded IP-based geolocation service.

It’s more than just the add-ons. The OpenGeo Suite comes complete with the entire OpenGeo Suite team! (We’re glad companies don’t ship software boxes anymore.) You get access to the core developers of all the components, unlimited bug fixes, updates, and even custom development hours on some plans. We understand that commercial support is one of the key barriers to adoption of open source software, and our clients allow us to reinvest directly into our communities, furthering development of the software in line with our core mission of bringing the best practices of open source software to organizations around the world.

See what’s new in this release. And then download a free trial of the Enterprise Edition (or the Community Edition) today!