Unless people have been playing close attention, most of you probably aren't aware that GeoServer's going to have some really nice improvements coming in the next few months, with out any GeoServer developers doing much work at all.
OpenGeo contributes heavily to OpenLayers, and is right now working with a community to form GeoExt, a toolkit to build rich mapping applications with Ext.js and OpenLayers.
This should be a standards based core, with server specific extensions for MapFish server, GeoServer, GeoWebCache and others. OpenGeo is going to put some good energy towards it, with at least a portion of that going in to improving the experience of GeoServer users (but also doing everything in standards based ways so others can reuse).
First up will be Styler, the long dreamed for GUI SLD editor. We're close to an initial version that has rough integration with GeoServer through RestConfig. We hope to release some sort of download soon for people to try out. Though it's not to the totally intuitive awesome thing we dream of, it'll be far better than anything else out there. And will get better in conjunction with GeoExt evolution.
The second main piece will be a more integrated layer preview, improving a bit on http://demo.opengeo.org/geoview/ So users will be able to look at multiple layers at once. Our plan is to eventually expand this to do things like 'embed map in webpage', and integrate styling and eventually even some geoserver configuration, like uploading a shapefile, and configuring GeoWebCache.
Eventually GeoExt stuff may evolve to the sort of 'wizard' type functionality to create full mapping applications, like ArcGIS server and MapGuide do. But I have some ideas how we can improve on how they do things.
If anyone here is interested in this stuff, as a user or a contributor, check out http://geoext.org/ There isn't much up yet, but rest assured there's a very strong community forming right now.
best regards,
Chris
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Chris Holmes
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.