MapServer Project Update - 2007 Q1
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About MapServer
MapServer is a development environment for building spatially-enabled web mapping applications and services. It is fast, flexible, reliable and can be integrated into just about any GIS environment. It supports many popular spatial data formats including OGC web services.
MapServer features MapScript, a powerful scripting environment, that supports PHP, Python, Perl, C#, Java and more. Using MapScript makes it fast and easy to build complex geospatial web applications.
Recent Events
October 2006
- MapServer 4.10.0 release
February 2007
- MapServer 4.10.1 release
Future development - MapServer 5.0
The MapServer development team plans to release version 5.0 by the end of summer 2007. The 5.0 Release Plan outlines a number of planned updates, including:
- Support for AGG, an up and coming image renderer as an alternative to GD
- Upgrade of WMS support to version 1.3.0
- Improved OGC SOS Server support
- New OGC OWS Common support version 1.0.0
- Dynamic charting capability
- Label prioritization
- MapScript memory management fixes
- Redesign of the LOG/DEBUG output mechanism
- ... and much more ...
Statistics
- Mapserver-Users list statistics (for 2007-Q1):
- Number of subscribers: 2344
- Number of countries represented: 67 (In all continents but Antarctica)
- Number of posts per month: 415 (average for Jan-Mar 2007)
- Also take a look at MapServer Development statistics at Ohloh. Here are some excerpts:
- 27 developers: " Over the past twelve months, 12 developers contributed new code to MapServer. This is a relatively large team, putting this project among the top 5% of all project teams on Ohloh. For this measurement, Ohloh considered only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 27 developers have contributed."
- Mature, well-established codebase: "The first lines of source code were added to MapServer in 2000. This is a relatively long time for an open source project to stay active, and can be a very good sign.
A long source control history like this one shows that the project has enough merit to hold contributors's interest for a long time. It might indicate a mature and relatively bug-free code base, and can be a sign of an organized, dedicated development team."
Note: The source code for MapServer is actually older than the source control history. The project started around 1996 but started using CVS only in 2000.