@FOSS4G Buenos Aires, 2013-04-26.

1. MapServer Project Status
Jeff McKenna, @mapserving

2. MapServer Project Status
• History
• Statistics
• Recent Highlights
• Future plans
• How to contribute
• Q & A

3. History
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
ForNet project starts
(im
gserv)
Shapelib
+
G
D
release
(m
apserv)
V
1.0
V
2.0
(Public
release
as
ForNet M
apServer)
V
3.0
(UM
N
M
apServer, raster +
Truetype
added)
V
3.3
(M
apScript, PRO
J4
added)
V
3.4
(PHP
M
apScript added)
V
4.0
(O
G
C
W
FS. SW
F, PDF
and
G
DAL
output, +++
...)
W
eb-based
Arc/Info
AM
L
G
eneration
V
4.2
(O
G
C
W
M
S
SLD, W
FS
Filters, ...)
V
4.4
(O
G
C
W
CS, W
M
S
Tim
e, i18n, ...)
V
4.6
(SVG
output, G
EOS, ...)
V
4.8
(O
G
C
SO
S)
V
4.8
(O
G
C
SO
S)
V
4.10
(angle
follow), 5.0
(AG
G
)
V
5.2
(M
ove
to
O
SG
eo, Incubation)
V
5.4, 5.6
(Perform
ance,
rendering, security)
V
6.0
(rend. API)
Suite

4. Statistics
• MapServer-users
– 1860 members
– ~15 posts/day (2012: 2700, 2011: 3600, 2010:
3600, 2009: 4900, 2008: 5400)
• MapServer-dev
– 420 members
– ~4 posts/day (2013 so far: 400)
• IRC #mapserver: 30+ people
• 36 committers, 151000 lines of code
• Downloads? (MS4W: 5000/month?)

5. MapServer PSC
• Steve Lime (chair)
• Daniel Morissette
• Frank Warmerdam
• Yewondwossen
Assefa
• Howard Butler
• Steve Woodbridge
• Perry Nacionales
• Tom Kralidis
• Jeff McKenna
• Umberto Nicoletti
• Tamas Szekeres
• Thomas Bonfort
• Olivier Courtin
• Mike Smith

6. Binary Distributions
• Windows
– MS4W
– OSGeo4W
• MacOSX
• Linux
– UbuntuGIS
– DebianGIS
– Enterprise Linux
– OpenSUSE
• OSGeo-Live

7. Documentation
• Restructured text files
• Stored on github.com/mapserver/docs
• Generated into html through Sphinx
• Live site lives on “ProjectsVM”
• Re-generated every 2 hours

8. Documentation

9. Wiki

10. Recent Highlights
• MapServer Suite
• git/github
• Releases
• Code Sprints
• WMS Performance Shoot-outs

11. 6.0/6.2 Release
• 6.0.3 – May, 2012
• 6.2.0-beta1 – June, 2012
• 6.2.0-beta2 – August, 2012
• 6.2.0-beta3 – September, 2012
• 6.2.0-beta4 – September, 2012
• 6.2.0-rc1 – October, 2012
• 6.2.0 – November, 2012
• 6.2.1 – April, 2013

12. MapServer Suite
• Since 6.2 release
– MapServer core
– MapCache
– TinyOWS

13. MapCache
• Apache module for fast tile caching in
MapServer
• Written in C
• Cache types: disk(png), sqlite, berkeleyDB,
GeoTIFF, MBTiles, memcache
• services: WMS, WMTS, TMS, KML
• Includes seeding tool

14. TinyOWS
• Enables WFS-T in MapServer
• Supports PostGIS backend

15. git/github
• Since April 2012
• Moved from trac/svn to github.com
• Fast adoption by the young generation
• “Old timers” slower to adjust

16. 6.2 Release
• INSPIRE compliant WMS Server changes
• Mask layers
layer
status on
name "naturalearth"
mask "countries"
type raster
end

17. 6.2 Release
• INSPIRE compliant WMS Server changes
• Mask layers
layer
status on
name "naturalearth"
mask "countries"
type raster
end

18. 6.2 Release
• Complex Label Support
– Multiple LABELS per CLASS
– Label EXPRESSION

19. 6.2 Release
• Label Leader lines
CLASS
...
LEADER
maxdistance 30
gridstep 5
STYLE
color 0 0 0
width 1
END
END
LABEL
...
END
END

20. 6.2 Release

21. Code Sprints
• Boston, March 2013
– ~10 MapServer contributors
– (Also GDAL/PDAL, PostGIS, GeoMOOSE)
– Documentation restructuring
– CMake build system
– Improved expression handling
– Dynamic contour generation
– OGC certification tweaks for WMS/WFS/WCS
– Dynamic line smoothing

22. Boston 2013

23. Contour Generation
• On-the-fly contour generation for a DEM
LAYER NAME "my_contour_layer"
TYPE LINE
STATUS DEFAULT
CONNECTIONTYPE CONTOUR
DATA /mnt/data/raster/grib/dem.grib
PROCESSING "BANDS=1"
PROCESSING "CONTOUR_ITEM=elevation"
PROCESSING "CONTOUR_INTERVAL=10"
CLASS
STYLE
WIDTH 2
COLOR 255 0 0
END
END

24. Line Smoothing
• On-the-fly line simplification
• Using “SIA algorithm: Smoothing via Iterative
Averaging”
GEOMTRANSFORM (smoothsia([shape],
[smoothing_size], [smoothing_iteration],
[preprocessing]))

25. Line Smoothing

26. WMS Performance Shoot-out
• MapServer vs other mapping engines
• 5 editions of the exercise
• Next at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Benchmarking_2013
• Highlights of improvements to MapServer:
– Large DBF support
– Improving labels on curved lines
– Handling label precision

27. Open Source Geospatial FoundationOpen Source Geospatial Foundation 2727
Benchmarking 2010
8 Teams
Dedicated servers
Area specific data set
(Spain)

30. Vector Results – OSM/PostGIS
Benchmarking 2011

31. Future Plans
• UTFGrid support
• Control of OWS services through IP address
• OGC Compliance certification for WMS 1.1.1
and 1.3.0
• Continued work on performance
• Documentation improvements

32. Other ideas in the air
• SLD handling improvements
• ...

33. How to Contribute?
• Users:
– Beta and release candidate testing
– Bug reports on Github, including test cases
– Documentation (wiki, Github pull requests)
– Answers on the mapserver-users list and IRC
• Developers:
– Bug fixes/patches
– New features
– Binary builds

34. MapServer MapServer!
Jeff McKenna
@mapserving