Sharing thoughts about FOSS4G-IT 2010 part 1

Ciao a tutti,

as announced in a previous post today we start to share the materials produced for the Foss4g-IT conference. Thanks to SUPSI, that in Lugano was host of this nice event, we had a very good time.

In this first part we are sharing the slides of the presentation that Ing Simone Giannecchini, founder of GeoSolutions, illustrated at SUPSI’s Aula Magna.

In this presentation you’ll find the state of art as far as Geoserver and its latest features are concerned: integrated security, dynamic symbolizers and ImageIO-Ext GDAL support. Also, quite interesting, it’s the use case describing an integrated system for scientific purpose that uses open source software to manage environmental and geographic data. This bring us to the definition of OpenSDI, a Spatial Data Infrastructure stack based on open source software that GeoSolutions is creating.

OpenSDI will not be simply an aggregation of different open source geospatial frameworks, it will be an integrated infrastructure based on best-of-breed components to provide, out-of-the-box, a complete, tested, integrated and supported solution for managing an enterprise spatial data infrastructure … and not only!

Soon, in the second part of this post, we will share the live-DVD produced for the foss4g-IT workshop. With this anyone we’ll be able to try and test, in a vary easy way (no installation required), Geoserver and others Geosolutions’s products!

... To be continued ......

Geosolutions Foss4g It 2010

View more presentations from GeoSolutions.

(FIX) GDAL extension not working with GeoServer's Windows service wrapper

Today, we have investigated the issue reported by several users on the GeoServer's mailing list about being unable to get the GDAL-ImageI/O-Ext extension to work when GeoServer runs as a service on Windows.

Deploying the GDAL ImageI/O-Ext native libraries in a location referred by the PATH environment variable (like, as an instance, your JDK/bin folder) allows GeoServer to successfully recognize them when invoked via the start.bat script. However, this does not seem to work when running GeoServer as a service on Windows. As a result, during the service startup, GeoServer log reports this worrysome message:

it.geosolutions.imageio.gdalframework.GDALUtilities loadGDAL
WARNING: Native library load failed.java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no gdaljni in java.library.path

Taking a look at the wrapper.conf configuration file available inside the GeoServer installation (at bin/wrapper/wrapper.conf), we can find this useful entry:

# Java Library Path (location of Wrapper.DLL or libwrapper.so)
wrapper.java.library.path.1=bin/wrapper/lib

To solve the issue, you have 2 possible ways:

1. move the native DLLs on the referred path (bin/wrapper/lib)
2. add a wrapper.java.library.path.2=path/where/you/deployed/nativelibs entry just after the wrapper.java.library.path1=bin/wrapper/lib line.

Restarting the service, you should now see the GDAL ImageI/O-Ext plugins available when you try to create a new store, as shown in the image below. Notice that we are here assuming that you have properly configured the various environment variables as suggested in this link.

Geoserver continuous map wrapping!

Recently one of our clients has provided us with the funding to address an issue with the Geoserver rendering core module that was preventing us from drawing polygons crossing the dateline change, or, to put it another way, to be able to have maps that were wrapping like continuous wrapped maps from Google.


Our specific use case is also quite challenging on its own since we need to use a projection in which the dateline change has been moved away from the usual -180/+180 by using a non standard central meridian
The result, prior to the work described here, does not look so good across the discontinuity, as shown below

The problem was that GeoServer was performing point by point reprojections, therefore when a point was crossing the dateline the modular math used kicked in trasforming +181 -> -179. This meant that the next point, when crossing the dateline, was moved to the other side of the world.


In order to perform proper processing of projection singularities and dateline wrapping on selected projections, in particular, Mercator, Transverse Mercator, and flat geographic, we have had to do some work at the GeoTools level, modifying the renderer. The outcome is that we finally have obtained seamless wrapping maps similar to the Google ones, as shown here:

Continents layer from Oracle datastore in EPSG:3329

Continents layer from Oracle datastore in EPSG:90013

You can try this work yourself starting from GeoTools 2.5.x and above and GeoServer 1.7.7 and 2.0.1. On the development versions of the two seoftware the tweak is automatically applied while on the other side for the stable versions you need to specify two JVM options:
-DADVANCED_PROJECTION_ HANDLING=true
-DUSE_STREAMING_RENDERER=true

A big thanks goes to Andrea Aime who has been hired for the implementation of this feature.

Notizie dal FOSS4G-IT 2010 Lugano

Scriviamo dall’aula magna della Scuola Università Professionale della Svizzera Italiana (SUPSI) che gentilmente ospita presso le sue strutture l’edizione 2010 del FOSS4G-IT.

Di seguito pubblichiamo uno scatto della giornata di ieri, la giornata dedicata ai workshop, tipicamente il momento nel quale gli ‘esperti’ del campo condividono le loro conoscenze per la formazione.

GeoSolutions, tramite Alessio Fabiani e Simone Giannecchini, core developers di Geoserver, GeoTools, GeoBatch e ImageIO-Ext, hanno messo a disposizione dei partecipanti le loro conoscenze di sviluppatori del Geoserver in tre intense ore di formazione di base e non solo.

E’ stata un’ottima occasione sia per noi di testare le nostre capacità formative, attività mai semplice e che richiede elevata professionalità ed un continuo rinnovamento delle tematiche trattate e del materiale formativo; sia per i partecipanti che hanno potuto sfruttare una corsia preferenziale per entrare nel mondo del Geoserver e della disseminazione dei dati geografici con standard OGC.

Il live-DVD prodotto per il workshop verrà presto messo a disposizione di tutte le persone che desiderano provare in maniera semplice, nessuna installazione richiesta, Geoserver ed altri software GIS.

Un ringraziamento particolare a Massimiliano Cannata ed all’Istituto di Scienze della Terra di Lugano (D.A.C.D).