Welcome

First, we'd like to welcome you to the GeoServer community. 'Who me?', you may be saying, 'I didn't sign up for any community, I just want some software'. Well simply by being interested in sharing your spatial data with others, we feel you are a part of what we are hoping to accomplish, and welcome you. We believe that the open sharing of information, and especially spatial data, is essential to tackle many of the problems of the world.

GeoServer aspires to be the Apache of spatial data sharing, by providing an open source, freely available implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Map Service (WMS) specifications. We hope to enable greater geographic interoperability by enforcing OGC standards and lowering the barriers to entry for geographic data providers interested in sharing their data. Even if you evaluate GeoServer and decide that another product suits your needs better, then by all means use it, we don't pretend that our software will meet every use (though we encourage you to help it do so). But if you do, please use one that fully implements OGC standards.

The GeoServer Project itself strives to be as open as possible,making it easy for any one to contribute, be it with feature suggestions, bug reports, patches, documentation, encouragement, funding, development, design, translation, or more. We in building GeoServer collaboratively, 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 we ask that if you do find the software useful you try to find a way to give back, as good users are our most valuable resource. See the How to Help section for more on this, but we would like to dispel the notion right here that it is only through writing code that you can contribute. There are many, many ways that you can help us build a better geographic data server, and some of them only take a couple of minutes. If you have had enough of our blathering at this point and just want to get started you can skip to the installation section (or the quickstart section, but if you're really impatient you've probably already done that). For a deeper introduction, including the history and philosophy of the GeoServer Project, please read on.

History

GeoServer was started by The Open Planning Project(TOPP), a small non-profit in New York, looking to make urban planning decisions more open to the citizens they affect. TOPP is working to create a whole suite of tools to enable open democracy and to help make government more transparent. These tools themselves must be transparent and modifiable, so that they do not surreptitiously put forth an agenda. And they must be freely available, so that all can truly participate, not just those who can afford to spend money on software. For this reason all tools in the suite must be open source and free. The first of these was GeoServer, which came out of a recognition that a suite of tools to enable citizen involvement in urban planning would be for naught if they could not access any spatial data.

The GeoServer Project envisions a GeoSpatial Web, just like the World Wide Web, where you can search for and download text data, you could simply search and browse the spatial data web. Data providers would beable to publish their data straight to this web, and users could directly access it, without having to specifically know who might provide the data they want, contact them in some way, get emailed (or snail mailed, or pointed to a web location) some file, convert the file to a format they could work in, and then actually get started on the task they really want to do. At the time GeoServer was starting the OpenGIS Consortium was working on the Web Feature Service standard. It specifies a protocol to make spatial data directly available on the web, using GML (Geographic Markup Language), an interoperable data format. Happily Refractions Research had started work on PostGIS, giving GeoServer an open source spatial database to run on top of.

After wrestling with the fact that an internal model of geographic features was needed, and not wanting to replicate a ton of work, GeoServer found the Geotools project, an open source GIS Java toolkit. Both projects have benefited immensely from this collaboration as we helped develop much of their model further, and GeoTools code turned into direct GeoServer contributions, including support for Shapefiles, Oracle, and ArcSDE, as well as the WMS that is now an integrated part of GeoServer.

In 2003 GeoServer made its way to 1.0 as part of the OGC's CITE project, where we helped develop a conformance testing suite and were named the WFS reference implementation. Then we went back to the drawing board in order to build a much more scalable GeoServer, helping GeoTools redo their feature and data models. Refractions Research secured a GeoConnections grant from the Canadian government to develop GeoServer much further, and got immediately involved in the GeoTools data refactoring. Gabriel Roldan, who recently started Axis Engineering to do further work on GeoServer, helped rearchitect GeoServer to integrate GeoTools WMS, bringing us to 1.1. Then Jody Garnett and his team at Refractions really went to work, adding an innovative validation system to allow users to ensure that incoming transactions followed their defined rules. They also did the great STRUTS based web administration tool, so that users need never look at configuration files, taking us to 1.2. And through it all many, many contributions and suggestions by our users have played a huge roll in making GeoServer what it is today.

David Blasby took over lead developer responsibilities in 2005, leading the charge to version 1.3. This release takes GeoServer to a much more professional piece of software. WMS support is greatly improved, and many little kinks have been worked out. Work on uDig has greatly improved the GeoTools library, as GeoServer and uDig both perform bug fixes and feature enhancements on the same codebase. Many client applications have also been emerging, as uDig reaches maturity, gvSig continues to grow, and MapBuilder comes into its own. The future holds an integrated WCS with raster support from a group in Italy, and greatly improved handling of complex GML schemas and data types, from Gabriel Roldan and Social Change Online, with funding from the Australian government. TOPP will be focused on adding wiki like functionality to WFS-T, and re-engineering GeoServer to be more pluggable, to enable better parallel development and user contributed innovations.

Philosophy

The history of GeoServer should highlight a core belief of the project - that through cooperation we can build something greater than any of us could alone. We take the full open source development model extremely seriously, far beyond just the license, we believe in creating a community working together to build GeoServer. A good representation of this philosophy can be found in Eric Raymond's The Cathedraland the Bazaar. GeoServer accepts most all contributions, and allows any one to build upon the code. We treat our users as co-developers, as they are our most valuable resource. And we believe that a number of different companies, governments, NGO's, universities and R+Dg roups can all use and contribute to GeoServer for their own ends, making the software much better for all. This is already very much happening, as the major fundings for GeoServer have come from very diverse sources. We are working on some documents to show exactly how each can use and further build GeoServer together (check the wiki), but for now we just want to emphasize that the decision structure for the project is extremely open. It is a complete meritocracy, and anyone can influence the direction. TOPP is committed to employing someone to focus on keeping GeoServer moving, doing the day to day work of keeping the community going, but is ultimately working towards a complete self sustaining community. TOPP holds the copyright, but just sees itself as a steward for an emerging community, as the license is GPL, and will transfer control of the direction of the project to a Project Management Committee (PMC), like GeoTools has. But even if you do not become a major contributor, you still very much have a say on the direction of GeoServer, and there are many, many smaller ways in which you can contribute.

The other way that this core belief manifests itself is that we leverage as much already exisiting work as possible, and strive to work with other open source projects as much as possible. We've had varying success with this over the years, from GeoTools where we both have benefitted incredibly from close collaboration, to attempts to join up with other projects that were not quite as successful. But we believe strongly that the extra up front effort to just set up a collaboration pays off handsomely, as working with GeoTools has proven. So please get in touch if you are interested in collaboration. Often times it won't make sense to work directly with GeoServer, but working together at the GeoTools level can gain us almost all the benefits of direct collaboration, as each project's efforts will feed the others. If you are working in another programming language then we encourage you to use the open OGCinterfaces, and to test against GeoServer to make sure interoperability is actually achieved (and please report any bugs on the GeoServer end!). Beyond direct collaboration, we also make use of as many other open sourceprojects as possible. GeoServer would simply not be possible withoutJetty, PostGIS, Postgresql, Tomcat, Ant, STRUTS, xerces, wkb4j, and more. One of the greatest thing about open source is that we do not need to replicate work, we can just leverage the great work of others.

4. Communication

The two primary points of communication for the GeoServer projectare the email lists and our JIRA tasktracker.

There are currently two email lists,

• [email protected]
  and
• [email protected]

You may use either list, we started the user list for people who are not interested in all the development issues. We would like for the users list to be self supporting, so that experienced users can help out the newer people. The developers list gets a lot more email, which is partly historical, as it is the older list, and many people joined it before the users list was active. It also gets updates from the JIRA task tracker. Thesubscribe/unscribe interface and the archives for the lists are availablehere. One thing we definitely want to emphasize is to use the list for most all communication, please do not email individual developers. And be warned that if you do email individual developers they are likely to cc the list (unless you explicitly ask them not to). This is part of our belief in open collaboration - there are likely other people who have the same questions, and they would like to be able to at least read the archives and attempt to find the answer.

The second primary communication point is the task tracker. It keeps track of all bugs, feature requests, tasks, and issues, ensuring that the developers remember what needs to be done. It is available here. We recommend putting all feature requests and bug reports directly to it. For more information on the tracker and how to report a bug see 1 Reporting Issues.

Commercial Support

A variety of organizations offer high quality, professional, commercial support on GeoServer, for installation, training, new features, system analysis and implementation, and open source migration. See the Commercial Support page for details.