Greetings from GeoSolutions' CEO

Developers Corner: Improving GeoServer security

Hi,

during the last few weeks we have been thinking a lot about improving the GeoServer security, making it at the same time easier to integrate with external authorization systems and making it more expressive in terms of what kind of security rules can be expressed.

As part of the work we have been re-evaluating how the security can be applied in an ever growing software like GeoServer without having to cripple the available service abilities or to have to run after the developers constantly adding new features to the system.

The evaluation resulted in a (long-ish) comparison of the possible models, including the all popular security proxy as well as the existing GeoServer implementation, and coming up with an approach that extends what we already have for improved overall security and improved pluggability with existing systems.

Read the full comparison and the proposed solution in this GeoSolutions tech report

Interested in advancing GeoServer security subsystem? Let us know!

The GeoSolutions team

Estimating time and space required to build a GeoWebCache on disk cache

An outstanding issue when using GeoWebCache is finding out how much disk space a certain layer will use, on disk, once fully cached, and also how much time it will take to pre-seed the cache up until a certain layer.

The GeoWebCache site used to link to a Google Documents spreadsheet providing such an estimate, but the link is gone from the current documentation and, regardless, we found the spreadsheet to be less than accurate, basically ending up computing at the very least the seeding size of 1/4 of the entire world no matter how small the given area was.

Therefore we set out to create a better replacement that would actually count the tiles needed to seed a specific area. The result works for a cache in WGS:84 and is available for everybody to look at and use on Google Documents: GWC estimation - actual tile counting. The current setup compute the actual cache size for the entire Italy.

The document could probably use some more improvements, we're actually looking forward to hear from you about the results you're getting and possible improvements to the spreadsheet.
Let us know!

The GeoSolutions team