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!

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!

Another week, another wing added to the OpenGeo Gallery. As always, we showcase applications from around the world built using some or all of the the software components we help to develop: PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers, and GeoExt. These range from small-scale applications to national deployments. See for yourself.

We start out down under with the Australian Antarctic Data Navigator, showing observational data from the Australian Antarctic Division using a GeoExt client and served through GeoServer and GeoWebCache. Next up, our friends at the Ordnance Survey in the UK have built an interesting WMS Map Builder using OpenLayers that serves from their horde of national data. Somewhat closer to our home office, the State of Oklahoma has its own broadband map, similar to the National Broadband Map that we’ve highlighted here in the past. Finally, the World Health Organization hosts the International Travel and Health Map, a lightweight application that shows health risks on a per-country basis.

We’re nowhere near done yet—thanks to everyone who has sent in your applications.

Enter the OpenGeo Gallery

The OpenGeo Gallery keeps on growing, with more and more exciting real-world applications showcasing the software we help develop: PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers, and GeoExt.

This week, we present some high profile sites. Most notably, we have the World Bank Open Data site, a portal to access all public statistical and demographic data served by the World Bank, whose viewer contains an integrated OpenLayers client. We also have Protected Planet, a United Nations-related mapping website.hat uses PostGIS and GeoServer to provide information and media on protected areas across the world. Additionally, we have have added OpenStreetMap in a Box, an easy-to-install portable installation of OpenStreeMap data utilizing OpenLayers. Finally, our friends at AppGeo contributed their MapGeo Parcel Viewer, which leverages the entire OpenGeo Suite to provide local governments, businesses, and the public easy access to local maps and detailed property information.

Keep those entries coming! We want the OpenGeo Gallery to be the premier destination for showcasing the best live, real-world, open source geospatial applications.

See the OpenGeo Gallery

Last week we introduced the OpenGeo Gallery, a place where we showcase live applications that make use of GeoServer, OpenLayers, and other software that OpenGeo develops and supports.

This week, we have added a few more entries, many with a government or NGO focus. Starting close to home, we have NYCityMap, New York City’s official online map portal. Aiming further south, there is GeoPortal Gulf Response, which tracks information related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Finally, and not at all south, we have the Norwegian National Mapping Authority’s official online Norway Map (Norgeskart).

We invite you to enter the Gallery and wander around. We’ll be showcasing more applications in the weeks to come.

Of all the questions we are commonly asked, who is using your software? ranks pretty highly.

While we publish numerous case studies about clients who have built applications directly with us, there are many more organizations that have built amazing projects using software that underlies the OpenGeo Suite, namely PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers, and GeoExt.

In hopes of better publicizing these projects, we have created the OpenGeo Gallery to showcase the best applications built using software that we support. Whether you are interested in all examples together in one place or just some highlighted examples, the OpenGeo Gallery highlights some great organizations making use of cutting-edge technology.

As time goes on, we hope to add to the Gallery and showcase some of those applications here on the blog. If you know of an application using the OpenGeo Suite or any of its components and wish to have us publicize it on our website./p>

View the OpenGeo Gallery

At the FOSS4G conference in Barcelona this past week we announced the availability of new OpenGeo training materials online, all of which are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike With Attribution license. Introductory workshops on the PostGIS spatial database, OpenLayers web mapping library, and the GeoServer map and feature server are all available online at workshops.opengeo.

Watch this space and the usual geo news outlets as OpenGeo continues adding new workshops and advanced materials as we develop and present them.

Yesterday at FOSS4G, Tim Schaub presented a 3.5 hour workshop on how to use and abuse OpenLayers. We have put the material online for your learning pleasure!

If you are at FOSS4G and want to learn more about OpenLayers, we are having “OpenLayers Q&A Time” on Wednesday from 13:00-15:00 and Thursday from 10:00-12:00. Come talk to Tim and Andreas Hocevar, our OpenLayers experts at the OpenGeo booth on the exhibition floor.

If you are at FOSS4G this week, and you want some expert advice about our core open source projects, from real live developers, come by the OpenGeo booth and take advantage our or Q&A times! We will have our core developers available to answer questions and hear your feedback at set times throughout the conference:

• Tuesday, 14:00-16:00
  GeoServer and PostGIS: Justin Deoliveira, Andrea Aime, David Winslow, Paul Ramsey
• Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
  GeoServer: Justin Deoliveira, Andrea Aime, David Winslow
• Wednesday, 13:00-15:00
  OpenLayers & GeoExt: Andreas Hocevar, Tim Schaub
• Wednesday, 15:30-1700
  GeoNode: Sebastian Benthal, Galen Evans (World Bank), David Winslow
• Thursday, 10:00-12:00
  OpenLayers & GeoExt: Andreas Hocevar, Tim Schaub
• Thursday, 13:00-16:00
  PostGIS: Paul Ramsey, Alyssa Wright

We hope to see you there!

Thanks to OpenGeo’s Whit Morris and Jonah Bossewitch from the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) the two organizations co-hosted the NYC Open Mapping Sprint last weekend.

Jeremiah Trinidad-Christensen opened space for the sprint in Columbia University’s Lehman Social Sciences Library. There, most of OpenGeo’s international team met with people from Columbia, MetaCarta, NOAA, and beyond.

Highlights

OpenLayers developer Chris Schmidt came to the sprint. He joined members of our own JavaScript team and a developer from CCNMTL in working towards the upcoming OpenLayers 2.8 release. Several patches were also made towards GeoExt core.

Our GeoServer team made progress cleaning legacy code from the GeoServer codebase. This work eases the lives of plugin developers who would otherwise have to modify core classes. Look for configurable extensions building on these improvements starting to be available in GeoServer 2.0.

Lastly, we took some time to explore PostGIS’s geocoder project, which uses the TIGER United States census data set. Existing commercial geocoding services are tied to restrictive terms of service agreements. At OpenGeo, we are interested in providing a more open geocoding option.