MapServer Report 2008

MapServer

the top 5-10 key items that the project or PSC accomplished this period

Project graduated from OSGeo incubation process in December
MapServer 5.2 released in July:
- Nearly 200 tickets were closed as part of this effort.
- Notable features and enhancements include:
  - Performance enhancements for large shapefile handling (following Geoserver comparison)
  - Performance enhancements for AGG rendering (an order of magnitude faster in some cases)
  - Rendering improvements:
    - fuzzy label outlines for AGG
    - style-level opacity for AGG
    - quantization and palette support for PNGs and RGBA modes
    - pre-clip label point computation (helps in tile generation)
  - OGC Web Services:
    - WCS 1.1.0 support (RFC-41)
    - SOS 1.0.0 support
    - WFS 1.1.0 support
    - Compliance testing (WMS 1.1.1 ready to certify)
  - proxy and http authentication support for cascaded WMS requests
  - Support for auth cookie forwarding (RFC-42)
  - Direct tile generation for Google Maps API (RFC-43)
  - Native Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Support (RFC-38)
  - extent (e.g. shpext, mapext) template tag attribute handling
  - Simplified Template Support for Query Output (MS RFC 36)
New website launched in December! Quite an improvement for usability and maintainability over the previous site!
We moved from the UMN to OSGeo infrastructure (thanks to UMN for hosting us for all those years!)
We finally got a hold of the mapserver.org domain which has become our new home

any weaknesses in process, software, management, etc. that you plan to address or recognize need some help

Keeping documentation up-to-date with development remains a challenge
- Content is spread between the new website and the MapServer trac wiki and it is unclear when to transition between the two
The project still doesn't do a great job marketing itself at OSGeo conferences.
Google Summer of Code: try to attract some students in the next editions

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

general website and documentation maintenance
multilingual documentation support
new coders always welcome, a good way to start is by contributing bug reports and patches
experienced users can contribute to the release process by testing the betas and RCs and reporting their results

this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2009 :)

MapServer 5.4 to be released in early March
Strong presence at the Toronto Code Sprint in March where we will focus on 6.0 release features and performance improvements
MapServer 6.0 release sometimes in the fall (hopefully before FOSS4G)
Reestablish features lost in the website transition (specifically the gallery section)