GeoServer 0.96 was released yesterday. The biggest news of the release is
the addition of shapefile support. Credit for this resides more with the
amazing geotools team, due to a new geotools plug-in datasource mechanism
written by James Macgill, and some excellent work by Ian Schneider to get
the shapefile datasource compatible with the way GeoServer currently
returns things. A number of bugs have also been fixed, and the full suite
of ogc spatial filters, like overlaps, touches, beyond, etc. are now
supported.
Information on how to use shapefiles with GeoServer can be found in the
advanced section of the user docs. Postgis is still the preferred
datasource, due to its speed and transactional capabilities, and more
extensive testing. But for those users wishing to get geoserver up and
running quickly shapefiles will hopefully provide a viable option. Large
shapefiles have not been tested too extensively, and as this is the first
release of shapefile support there may be other issues. But we encourage
users to download the latest version at
http://prdownloads.sf.net/geoserver/geoserver-0.96.tar.gz?download and
report back to us on how it works. A sample shapefile with 4 features is
included in the topp--road featureType, allowing you to download
geoserver, run 'ant test', which starts the embedded tomcat server, and
get gml features by putting
http://localhost:8081/GetFeature?typename=topp:road into a browser.
One unfortunate problem with the latest release that we realized after
putting it out is an issue with the encoding of some international
characters. If you have been using GeoServer with no modifications you
have nothing to worry about, but there are a few users who are currently
modifying the source to get the correct charSet into postgis.
Unfortunately that backdoor is no longer available, as that code has moved
into geotools. We should get a version in cvs within a few days that
allows users to specify the charSet, and will work to make encoding more
painless. So for users working with international character encodings in
their postgis dbs we recommend waiting for 0.97 or working off of cvs.
Thanks again for using and testing geoserver, we appreciate your support,
and welcome any suggestions, bug reports, and feedback on this list or at
geoserver@anonymised.com