OpenGeo

I’m looking forward to this year’s Where 2.0 in San Jose coming up in three weeks! Where is always a different mix of folks from a usual GIS show, and the Silicon Valley vibe is something you can only get… well, in Silicon Valley.  I am going to be teaching a workshop with Steve Citron-Pousty on the open source geospatial stack, using our own OpenGeo Suite for a big part of the software we show.

If you’re coming to Where 2.0 and want to talk about OpenGeo in general or PostGIS in particular, please let me know! Either drop me an email or hit my Where 2.0 profile.

GEOS, the geometry engine underneath the PostGIS spatial database (part of the OpenGeo Suite), has achieved a version 3.2.0 release! The latest release includes performance improvements in buffering, general C++ performance improvements, and an implementation of single-sided buffering. PostGIS users who upgrade their GEOS will get all the performance improvements automatically. The upcoming release of PostGIS 1.5 (about which we are very excited) will also tie in support for the new single-sided buffers.

We want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to download and try out the OpenGeo Suite. A few months ago, we put together a LiveDisk, a bootable DVD image containing all of the software preconfigured. However, we recognize that a sandbox environment like that is only worthwhile as a first step. “That looks great,” I’ve heard, “but how do I get it on my machine?”

To this end, we have started work on the OpenGeo Suite Installer. This is an integrated package that installs and configures the OpenGeo Suite on your system. It makes the process of evaluating our software easy, within the familiarity of your own system.

We have a preliminary release available for you to try. The package contains the following:

• GeoServer (plus documentation)
• GeoServer Data Importer (an automated shapefile importer)
• GeoExplorer (plus documentation)
• Getting Started Guide

We have lots of plans for this project in the very near future, including integrated plugin support for GeoServer, GeoBuilder (which will combine graphical styling, map composition, and map export all in one), PostGIS support, and much else. Currently, the OpenGeo Suite installer is available for Windows only, but we anticipate adding support for other operating systems soon.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think.