Core Development
What is Core Development?
Core development adds new features to the open source projects we participate in: GeoServer, OpenLayers, GeoExt and PostGIS.
We have prepared “road maps” of features and activities we consider important to the continued growth and maturity of the projects.
OpenGeo offers reduced rates for programming of items in the core development road maps.
A common question we get is “will this feature be in the next release?”
The only way to ensure a feature is added on a particular schedule or before a particular release is to fund the development of that feature.
Tell us what road map feature you are interested in, and how much funding you can put behind it.
We will combine your support with others until there is enough backing to complete the feature. For more information see the FAQ.
GeoServer
GeoServer always tries to stay up on the latest standards, but no one has yet funded WMS 1.3. Most of the needed infrastructure is already in place, as it was required for WFS 1.1. But the bindings need to be built and it must pass the CITE compliance tests.
A new, cleaner user interface built on the Wicket web framework. The new interface will be “pluggable”, so plug-ins to GeoServer can define their own user interface and have it picked up by the core automatically.
GeoExt
Creating new geometry from COGO directions is a common use case for web editing tools in county and municipal jurisdictions. This work item will create a GUI for users to enter COGO directions and return traverse data model suitable for converting to a feature or serializing to a database.
Map Styling Tools (SLD editing)
A premier feature of GeoExt will be a powerful style editor, built on the SLD standard, that can be integrated in to any application to let users change how the map looks. This will build on the work of Styler, improving and integrating those components to allow standalone SLD editing in addition to server-side style administration. It should support a variety of user friendly tools to create complex styling rules with ease.
GeoWebCache
Several improvements to GeoWebCache could be done to better support clustering for reliability and scalability. While traditional clustering techniques work there are several unique aspects of geospatial cache clustering which can be optimized for directly in the GeoWebCache codebase.
Respond to arbitrary zoom levels (WMS through tile recombination)
The main limitation of a cache like GeoWebCache is that it can only respond to requests at set zoom levels. A more intelligent cache, however, could properly recombine the raster tiles it knows about and sub-sample it up or down to the requested zoom level. In this way it could serve most any WMS request, instead of being limited by the pre-set cache.
OpenLayers
Support Cascadenik, a way to style maps in using a syntax similar to CSS, as a way to persist and create OpenLayers style objects. Makes cartography easy for web designers.
Creating new geometry from COGO directions is a common use case for web editing tools in county and municipal jurisdictions. This work item will take in COGO directions and return a feature suitable for rendering on the map, sending back to the server, etc.
PostGIS
The PostGIS spatial index currently splits pages based on longest edge. This results in trees that have sub-optimal spatial clustering in the branches, which in turn makes for sub-optimal clustering. A packed R-Tree would provide the highest performance clustering.
Support for ST_Union(), ST_Difference(), and true/false predicate tests calculated natively on the sphere for the GEOGRAPHY type introduced in PostGIS 1.5.