OSGeo AGM Project Report 2008

== Progress on incubation ==
... finally about ready to graduate

== 5.2 release in July 2008 ==
* Nearly 200 tickets were closed as part of this effort.
* Notable features and enhancements include:
* MapServer users manual (docs wrapped into a single downloadable PDF)
* Performance enhancements for large shapefile handling (following Geoserver comparison)
* Performance enhancements for AGG rendering (an order of magnitude faster in some cases)
* Rendering improvements:
* fuzzy label outlines for AGG
* style-level opacity for AGG
* quantization and palette support for PNGs and RGBA modes
* pre-clip label point computation (helps in tile generation)
* OGC Web Services:
* WCS 1.1.0 support (RFC-41)
* SOS 1.0.0 support
* WFS 1.1.0 support
* Compliance testing (WMS 1.1.1 ready to certify)
* proxy and http authentication support for cascaded WMS requests
* Support for auth cookie forwarding (RFC-42)
* Direct tile generation for Google Maps API (RFC-43)
* Native Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Support (RFC-38)
* extent (e.g. shpext, mapext) template tag attribute handling
* Simplified Template Support for Query Output (MS RFC 36)
* Thanks to all contributors (devs, docs, testers, $$). Special thanks to the USACE for funding lots of that work.

== What's coming ==
* 5.4 release early 2009
* Tuning and performance optimizations
* New features / enhancements:
- WMS 1.3.0
- KML output
- XML mapfile???
- Rendering enhancements:
- fractional line width (0.5 pixel lines with AGG)
- label positioning enhancements (following comparison with Geoserver)
- and many others as detailed in RFC 45
- unified rendering API (merge GD, AGG, etc...), this is a hopefully pending GD 3.0
- label text transformations RFC 40
- hoping that a OpenGL renderer will be donated to the project???
- URL-based configuration expansion (RFC-44)
- scale-dependent tile index support
* Docs/demos
- Docs: debugging and tuning guide
- Work on a new website or improve existing site
- New mapserver demo (based loosely on the OpenLayers functional demos)

== Stats ==

• Number of members on lists:
  • users: 1843
  • dev: 339
• Welcome 3 new committers:
  • Jeff !McKenna
  • Paul Ramsey
  • Alan Boudreault