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!

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

Hot on the heels of last week’s Community Edition roll-out, we are happy to announce the newest version of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition. This version comes off an extended testing period, and incorporates feedback from our Community Edition users, as well as the wider project communities.

While not a large overhaul, this new version does feature better handling of authentication in GeoExplorer. No more unauthorized access!

Now that GeoExplorer has integrated styling, editing, composing, and publishing, it is well on its way to becoming a full one-stop shop for all of your web GIS needs.

The Enterprise Edition’s Suite Analytics module now saves statistics to the included PostGIS database instead of a standalone H2 database. Suite Analytics, for those who aren’t familiar, is a module inside GeoServer for visualizing and managing server loads more effectively.

As usual, we offer a 30 day free trial of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition. Once you’ve gotten a taste of what’s possible with the OpenGeo Suite, we are confident that you and your organization will see the value of becoming an Enterprise Edition client. If you want to learn more about the OpenGeo Suite first, simply take the tour.

We’ve got some very exciting plans in the near future. We’re helping to move the world of web GIS forward, so we’d love to have you on board. You’ll be in great company.

We are happy to announce the release the OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.4.1!

It’s been a few months since we’ve put out a new version of the OpenGeo Suite Community Edition, but that’s not for lack of work. We’ve been quite busy not only adding new features, but melding in some of the great improvements that the Enterprise Edition received last month. Check it out:

Integrated styling and editing in GeoExplorer. We love the Styler and GeoEditor apps, but we thought that things would be that much better if we could integrate the styling and editing functionality directly into GeoExplorer. This means that now GeoExplorer can do more than just map composition and publishing. Much more.

Upload data through GeoExplorer. You can now upload single shapefiles and GeoTIFFs directly through the GeoExplorer interface, and the content will be loaded into GeoServer just as with the standard GeoServer Layer Importer. Yet another addition to the already powerful application, this will help you minimize switching between different applications for your data management.

GeoExplorer authentication. You wouldn’t want to give everyone the keys to the GeoExplorer kingdom, would you? We didn’t think so, so anything that requires server changes (styling, saving) now requires you to log in using administrator credentials.

Latest updates. Of course, all of the latest versions and bugfixes from our component projects comes standard.

We invite everyone to download this new version and give it a test drive. Please report any bugs to the OpenGeo Suite Community Forum. While the Community Edition is unsupported, we appreciate any reports from the field, and so will fellow members of our growing community.

Download the OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.4.1.

Our flagship product, the OpenGeo Suite, is tailor-made for system administrators, web developers, and GIS analysts alike. Being many things to different people means that we get a lot of questions from those wondering if the software is right for their organization.

With this feedback, we’ve put together an OpenGeo Suite Tour designed to give you a feel for the product as a whole. In this tour, we hope it will show you how deployment can benefit your work, both in web-based GIS, interoperability with existing systems, the power of open source, and most of all, production-ready software.

Take the OpenGeo Suite Tour