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.

GeoServer has come a long way towards INSPIRE compliance in the past year. It has added support for Web Map Service (WMS) 1.3, enhancements towards Symbology Encoding (SE) 1.1, and there’s an upcoming implementation of Web Feature Service (WFS) 2.0.

Interested in helping GeoServer achieve full INSPIRE compliance through funding or development?

In March of this year, the European Commission published version 3.0 of the Technical Guidance document for INSPIRE View Services (based on ISO19128 / WMS 1.3). This mandates that countries within the European Union must implement the Initial Operating Capacity by May 9 and Quality of Service requirements by November 9.

There are two scenarios defined for implementation:

1. The GetCapabilities document is extended with a link to a Catalogue Service for the Web (CS-W) for the ISO19119 Service Metadata
2. Extra elements are embedded into the GetCapabilities document itself

The current implementation with GeoServer focuses on implementing only the first scenario and, although INSPIRE does not require multilingual support, is currently limited to only serving up in one language.

I recently investigated which issues remain for GeoServer to meet all of the requirements of the INSPIRE View Service 3.0 specification. I have listed the relevant issues here, along with links back to the GeoServer issue tracker:

• While GeoServer does support adding keywords to the WMS GetCapabilities response, it does not yet support the optional vocabulary attribute, in which one can specify the thesaurus used. (#4658)
• For each Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) advertised for a layer, GeoServer must provide a corresponding BoundingBox element. (#4659)
• AuthorityURL and Identifier are not yet supported but are required to link to the gmd:MD_Identifier from the Metadata for datasets (ISO19115). (#4491)
• MetadataURL type does not support the value of ISO19115:2003. (#4595)

And finally, there are two minor issues that will only affect those certain highly-specific use cases:

• The advertized LegendURL does not include a STYLE parameter. This only affects those cases where a View Service is configured with more than just the inspire_common:DEFAULT Style. (#4661)
• The Cascaded attribute is not used by GeoServer when cascading other WMS services. This attribute needs to reflect the number of times a layer was cascaded. (#4662)

We hope to fix these issues soon to make GeoServer truly INSPIRE-compliant with respect to the View Service 3.0 specification.