Welcome

The GeoServer project is an integrated Java implementation of the 1.0 Web Feature Server and 1.1.1 WMS specification from the OpenGIS Consortium. GeoServer aspires to be the 'Apache' of OpenGIS data serving and its mission is to enable greater geographic interoperability by reinforcing OpenGIS and other web standards and lowering the barriers to entry for geographic data providers. Developers should keep in mind the four primary goals of GeoServer, listed in order of importance:

• Standards Compliance:
  The primary intent of the GeoServer project is to promote standardization and it must, therefore, adhere to published standards as closely as possible. GeoServer also attempts to support as many relevant geographic standards as possible.

• Data Format Support:
  In order to make GeoServer a useful product, it must help translate the current cacaphony of geogaphic data formats into a single format. Therefore, supporting several data formats - both relational and flat files - is of primary importance to the project.

• Ease of Use:
  GeoServer is targeted at organizations with minimal technical expertise and must, therefore, be easy to install, configure, and run for organizations with few technical resources.

• Efficiency:
  Given that the volume of data required by geographic applications generally entails severe computational and bandwidth loads, GeoServer strives to be as efficient as possible, while achieving other goals.

The GeoServer Project strives to be as open as possible, making it easy for any one to join the community and contribute, and to have a say in the direction that GeoServer heads. We want GeoServer to be collaboratively built, so that it can effectively meet a variety of needs, hopefully leading to a world of more open technology and open spatial data. To that end much effort has been put into documentation, so that new developers can easily get their bearings. If there are questions that are not answered by this developer's guide, or other documentation on this site, please ask, it's the only way the developers can know what needs improvement.

GeoServer has an active developer community that you can engage by joining the GeoServer mailing list and asking questions or making suggestions.

Contributing

Please see our How to Help page for lengthy information on contributing. It is mostly focused on non coding ways to help out, since things are a bit more obvious as a developer.

Most of these developer docs are aimed directly at how developers can contribute. There are always tasks to be done, but we have found in the past that it's better to have a problem you would like to solve, rather than ask developers where you might help out. If you do want to just help out, it's best to have an idea of what kinds of tasks you are interested in. A good place to start to get a sense of what we are working on is our JIRA task tracker. Or just ask the developers list. Generally the way to start is to find small improvements that can be made in the current code base, offering suggestions and patches, and moving from there into a full contributor as you start to figure out how all the pieces fit together. Our developers try to help you out in the learning process as much as possible, please don't hesitate to ask questions, and hopefully we can include the answers in future developers docs. We also highly encourage companies to spend some of their developers resources on expanding GeoServer's capabilities. In return for major work we are more than happy to put links on the main GeoServer site pointing users to commercial support offered by any company that contributes. Our community works on a meritocracy, those who contribute are rewarded by more say on the direction of the project. We give full responsibility and credit over various sections of the code to contributors who have proved themselves.

A note on the license

GeoServer is curently released under the Gnu Public License (GPL). None of our core contributors are fanatic about the GPL, it just seemed to be the best choice at the time, and we have not changed it since. We would like to say that the GPL is not anti-business, as many opponents like to make it out to be. Selling GeoServer is completely legal, as is offering commercial support on it. What it does is protects the rights of developers, by ensuring that no one can take the base of code and improve it without giving it back to those who laid the ground work. The main reason we like it because it keeps the community tighter, lets us know who else is working on GeoServer. If for some reason you would like to develop GeoServer, but your company is scared of the GPL, then please talk to the developers, as we can often come up with a good solution, releasing it under a different license to your company, for example. We don't care about all code being rolled back in, as the GPL stipulates, but we would like to know who else is working on GeoServer. So far we do not think the GPL license has held anyone up, perhaps due to the fact that GeoServer is a seperate enough piece of software that it does not affect others so much. But please let us know if the license does concern you. We are considering Apache or LGPL for GeoServer 2.0, as we are looking to make it more of a framework on top of which other web applications could hang.