GeoServer always tries to stay up on the latest standards, but up until recently, no one had funded WMS 1.3. Most of the needed infrastructure was already in place, as it was required for WFS 1.1, but the bindings needed to be built and it needed to pass the CITE compliance tests.
A nice addition would be to also implement Symbology Encoding 1.1, the successor to SLD, as it is more in line with WMS 1.3. This has been partially implemented at the time of writing.
Funding
This roadmap item was funded by Ordnance Survey. Thank you!
WMS 1.3 was first added to GeoServer in the 2.1-beta3 release, and will be a part of version 2.1.0 when it is released. WMS 1.3 was added to the OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.3.2 and will be added to the subsequent OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 2.4.0.
Other Roadmap Items
Currently the layers that GeoServer publishes are the same for all users. We'd like to introduce the concept of “workspaces”, a logical collection of layers, optionally with limited security permissions, accessible from a unique end point.
Funded: REST configuration allows AJAX and other clients to configure GeoServer without using the HTML user interface, providing the option of scripted configuration, automatic refresh, and other shortcuts useful for production deployments.
Currently features are only accessible via the Web Feature Service (WFS) API. REST feature access will provide a ”resource oriented“ approach to accessing geographic collections. It will also use the existing AtomPub specification to provide for feature viewing and editing.