Programming languages haven’t changed much over the years: the latest languages to take over large swathes of the industry (Java and C#) are unashamed about being cleaned-up versions of C++, which itself was a melding of C with object concepts. What has changed immensely recently is the state of the art in how large programs are built and tested, the “build chain”.

We don’t talk about this much because it isn’t very client-facing, but thanks to the efforts of Justin Deoliveira and Tim Schaub, OpenGeo has a quite robust build environment. Early on in the development on the OpenGeo Suite we found that the number of steps necessary to move from a particular version of the code to an installable and testable artifact was very high—so high that cycles of test/fix/re-test were just too long.

So we automated this chain, and not just the build. Our software is now automatically built out from source code all the way to installers (for Mac OS X and Windows) and packages (for Ubuntu Linux and CentOS Linux) and machine images (for Amazon AWS) every hour. The industry term for what we’re doing is called “continuous integration“.

The complexity of a system that builds multiple components (GeoServer, PostGIS, PostgreSQL, GeoExt, etc.) in multiple languages (C, Java, JavaScript) on multiple operating systems (Linux, OS X, Windows) is quite substantial, but it is all worth it to be able to incorporate a bug fix into a new installer in short order without human intervention. As we have many clients who are depending on our software for their deployments, this reliable turnaround is critical.

Our system has grown so large that we are now devoting a full-time engineer (welcome, Michael Weisman) just to maintaining and improving it. In time, we plan to add even more components and functions into the mix, such as continuous builds of GDAL and continuous unit testing of all components against multiple databases. The benefits in flexibility, quality, and development speed is well worth the investment.

So if you’re looking for us, you’ll find us building on the chain.

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!

Earlier this year Esri released a white paper highlighting the benefits of open source and open specifications. No, that wasn’t a joke; the article is real, and well worth a read. It is a solid summation of open source in the marketplace and discusses the differences between open source software and open standards (what Esri calls “open specifications”). But more fundamentally, in this paper, Esri makes a bold and sensible claim that may surprise some people:

Deciding between open source and ArcGIS is not an either/or question. Esri encourages users to choose a hybrid model, a combination of open source and closed source technology, based on their needs.

The paper goes on to talk about Esri’s integration with various open source projects, from their ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap, to their integration of Python into ArcGIS 10 (ArcPy), to their Geoportal Server, which is hosted on SourceForge. On the use of hybrid technology, we are in firm agreement. From the beginning, we have designed our software with integration in mind. For example, the OpenGeo Suite can connect to a number of proprietary databases, including ArcSDE, Oracle Spatial, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server, and the list continues to grow. In addition, with GeoCat Bridge you can publish data from ArcGIS Desktop to the web with the OpenGeo Suite.

Why would we advocate for proprietary systems? Simply put, we always suggest using the right tool for the job. Esri has great desktop tools, but on the server side there are faster, more reliable, more flexible options that support more standards. It can make sense to use ArcGIS Desktop and then use GeoCat Bridge to publish directly to the OpenGeo Suite. Or to use ArcSDE for data collaboration, then connect to the OpenGeo Suite to serve to the web. We know you have options when choosing any piece of software: Apache Tomcat versus IBM WebSphere, PostgreSQL versus Oracle Spatial, QGIS or uDIG versus ArcGIS Desktop, and, of course, the OpenGeo Suite versus ArcGIS Server. While we feel that open source holds the best route forward for software development, we are happy to give advice on the pros and cons of various architectures. The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition clients use a variety of solutions that meet their needs. We’ll be publishing some white papers in the near future to help you compare the different software options in the marketplace; and we applaud Esri for their moves toward open source, and appreciate their candor in promoting a hybrid model.

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.

Congratulations to the OpenLayers development team on the release of OpenLayers 2.11!

This release is a big one, closing over 380 outstanding tickets and providing significant performance improvements. The biggest win is the mobile support enhancements. OpenLayers now allows features to be dragged and zoomed with touch gestures on mobile devices. Handlers for pinching and zooming have also been added to the library.

Other key highlights are the plethora of performance enhancements and the additional support for accessing Bing Maps tiles. The release notes go into detail about all of the new features and you can see them in action on the OpenLayers demo site—to really get a feel for the improvements open the demo in a mobile browser.

OpenGeo is committed to the OpenLayers project and we’re eager to support it however we can. A good deal of the development was done by OpenGeo team members Tim Schuab, Andreas Hocevar and Bart van den Eijnden in February as a part of the code sprint hosted by Camptocamp and Swisstopo. That week in Switzerland proved to be a critical step forward in pushing mobile enhancements and the 2.11 release to completion. A full recap of the sprint is accesible from Tim’s post on the OpenLayers blog.

Thanks again to the OpenLayers team, the supporters of the code sprint and everyone who has contributed to this new release!

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!

GeoServer 2.1.0 was released late last week, after almost a full year of development work. You can read about the full details of all of the new features on the GeoServer Blog.

There are over a dozen new headline features, some of them quite large improvements: WMS 1.3, WMS Cascading, virtual services, GeoWebCache direct WMS integration. What do all of these new features have in common? They were all funded by organizations who are using GeoServer and want to see it develop and thrive. Some developments were made possible by OpenGeo, some by other commercial providers such as GeoSolutions and Refractions Research. A few were funded by OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition clients. All of these organizations may not have much in common operationally, yet their funding of this open source project has made a valuable software tool even more valuable for everyone.

We want to specifically thank those organizations who have contributed to GeoServer during this release cycle:

• Ordnance Survey - WMS 1.3.0
• MassGIS - WCS limits
• OBIS - Layers from SQL
• Landgate - Virtual Services
• SWECO - SLD Unit of Measure, DPI scaling
• Malmö City of Sweden - SLD Unit of Measure, DPI scaling
• University of Perugia - WMS Cascading

As we reflect on this milestone, we should remember that GeoServer is everyone’s project. Whether you just play around and report a bug or are a state agency using GeoServer in production, you are part of a large and thriving community. Your work, and your funding, helps improve the software.

So the next time someone asks why one would pay for ‘free’ software, take a look at this list. GeoServer is yours—and your funding makes it happen.

Look for GeoServer 2.1.0 as part of the next version of the OpenGeo Suite, coming soon.

The OpenGeo Suite is designed to help you publish and share your geospatial data. Since applications like GeoExplorer and GeoServer are web-based, the OpenGeo Suite has always been itching for the cloud. We’re removing the final hurdle by making it possible to deploy without your own infrastructure—the OpenGeo Suite is now optimized for the cloud!

While there’s a lot of talk and hype about cloud computing, at its most basic it is really just externally hosted servers. In the cloud, computing power is more like a commodity or a utility. By dynamically allocating server resources, cloud deployments enable ownership while also minimizing the effort involved in managing hardware. Consider the extra benefits of high availability, dynamic storage, auto-scaling, etc., as bonuses.

Though we’ve provided limited cloud services in the past, today we are throwing the gates wide open with almost a dozen new tiers from two providers: Amazon Web Services and Skygone. Many people are familiar with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their cloud computing platform. As leaders in cloud computing providing managed hosting solutions specifically geared towards geospatial applications Skygone is a natural fit for OpenGeo.

Signing up for the OpenGeo Suite on the cloud means having a public server provisioned for you, already configured, and ready to go within minutes. We do the hard work so you can concentrate on doing yours. Go on, upload some data with GeoExplorer and share a map with your friends to see just how easy it is.

In keeping with our desire to promote the OpenGeo Suite for any budget, we have many different options for cloud deployment. For those who want to start small, we offer tiers on Amazon with no setup fee and only a modest per hour charge. For those who want support from OpenGeo, we offer a number of plans with a range of computing power. With our partners at Skygone, we are offering a free trial of the OpenGeo Suite with no payment required to start; just enter in some information, and within a few minutes, the OpenGeo Suite is ready to go.

For more details, please see our Cloud Edition website.nd if you have any questions about our new offerings. This is only our initial release, so please send us some feedback and let us know if there are any issues with your initial deployments.

OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition