MapServer Report 2007

Project Name = MapServer

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
• Contact name: Steve Lime

Key Accomplishments

• Transformed the MapServer Technical Steering Committee (TSC) into the MapServer Project Steering Committee (PSC) (see RFC-23)
• Added four new members to the PSC
• Three maintenance releases of MapServer 4.10
• Migrated significant portions of MapServer project infrastructure, specifically CVS and Bugzilla, from the University of Minnesota to OSGeo infrastructure (SVN and Trac) in April 2007
• Implemented a buildbot
• Released MapServer 5.0 in early September 2007 closing more than 200 tickets. Key features include:
  • Support for the AGG rendering engine
  • Label prioritization control
  • Style and label attribute binding
  • Dynamic charting capabilities
  • Raster color correction via color lookup table
  • Dynamic allocation for most statically allocated elements (e.g. layers, classes and styles)
  • Improved memory management and garbage collection for MapScript
  • Enhanced debug/logging capabilies

Areas for Improvement

• OSGeo incubation process was slow, primarily limited to infrastructure migration from UMN to OSGeo.
• Like most projects, keeping documentation up-to-date with development remains a challenge.
• There was little or no time for collaboration with other similar (e.g. MapNik, GeoServer, MapGuide) projects although I guess this is only natural given the other demands of working on a project.
• The MapServer development team did a poor job representing the new release of MapServer (5.0) at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria.

Opportunities to Help

• list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report

Outlook for 2008

• this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2008 :)