New Version 1.5 released

We are proud to announce that today (June 8th 2010) Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.5 have been relased. The new versions come with a lot of changes "under the hood" which are not visible to the end user. Anyways - from a developers perspective - these changes were crucial to speedup further development and we are happy that we can purely focus on new features in next version 1.6 now.

The following points mark some of the most important new features in version 1.5:

Geopublisher:

• Geopublisher.exe
  For Windows users the ZIP download of Geopublisher now contains a Geopublisher.exe file. The .exe will offer to install Java if it can't be found on the computer.
• Direct import of zipped ESRI Shapefiles:
  Users can import zipped Shapefiles directly, without the need to unzip the Shapefile first.
• Import of GeoCommons metadata:
  When importing Shapefiles which have been downloaded from GeoCommons, Geopublisher will automatically parse title and attribute descriptions stored in the readme file.
• Map scale unit selectable:
  When composing maps, one can choose to show the map scale in feet & miles (US) or meters & kilometers (METRIC).
• Cleaner offline exports:
  Atlases exported for offline distribution (e.g. on a USB Stick or DVD) have a cleaner root directory. It now only contains atlas.exe (for Windows), start.sh (for MacOS and Linux), icon.gif and autorun.inf. All other files were moved to a subfolder atlasdata.
• Google EPSG:900913 is now supported
  
• Fonts: You may now add your own fonts to your atlas and use them for labelling.

AtlasStyler:

• Basic PostGIS support:
  Users now can create SLD/SE files for spatial data tables stored in a PostgreSQL+PostGIS database directly. Users do not have to create Shapefiles of their data first.
• AtlasStyler.exe
  For Windows users the ZIP download of AtlasStyler now contains an AtlasStyler.exe file. The .exe will offer to install Java if it can't be found on the computer.
• Define labelling classes:
  AtlasStylers labelling tab can import the symbolization classification as labelling classes. This allows you to have multiple label styles for one layer e.g. useful to label missing data in a different color.
• Google EPSG:900913 is now supported

Under the hood:

• Maven, Hudson and Artifactory:
  The biggest change in version 1.5 is the switch to the maven build system.
• Multiple smaller JARs:
  The Geopublishing sources have been seperated into five JAR-files: ascore, asswinggui, gpcore, gpswinggui, gpnatives. This allows for example to integrate the AtlasStyler classification logic in a Servlet without pulling any Swing related dependencies. The JAR-files are available from the wikisquare maven repository.
• Ready for OpenJDK:
  Geopublisher and AtlasStyler do not explicitly require Sun's Java Runtime Environment (JRE) any more. A recent OpenJDK JRE as shipped with Ubuntu 10.04 has so far passed all tests.
• Debian repository:
  Geopublishing software is now available via the Geopublishing repository. For Ubuntu/Debian this is the recommended installation method. The repository features the stable releases only.
• New version numbers:
  The version numbers are now related to the maven build process. Any version ending with "-SNAPSHOT" (e.g. "1.6-SNAPSHOT") is a development release for testing only. Any version number without "-SNAPSHOT" is a stable release.
• New surname: Krüger -> Tzeggai
  The project's head developer Stefan married and changed his last name from Krüger to Tzeggai. Hence Geopublisher and AtlasStyler are now (c) Stefan A. Tzeggai.
• Geopublishing Twitter account:
  If you want to follow (and comment on) latest thoughts and developments of the AtlasStyler and Geopublisher developers, follow us on twitter...
• IRC Channel:
  If you want to chat about a question or problem, you may want to look in the #geopublishing IRC channel on freenode.org
• Software translations:
  A Turkish translation of AtlasStyler is on the way, as well as an Italian translation of Geopublisher. Localization of the Software has been simplified and we are hoping for many new languages during the next months.

If you have any questions/problems/comments please ask them on the mailinglist. Bugs and feature-requests can be reported at the Wald project hosting site.

Note: There seem to be some problems running version 1.5 on Windows 7. We are working on it...