Meet GeoSolutions at the INSPIRE Conference 2013 in Florence!

Dear All,
we are proud to announce that GeoSolutions is sponsoring the INSPIRE Conference 2013 which we'll be held in Florence from Sunday 23rd to Thursday 27th June (you can get more information at this link).

GeoSolutions will be present with its own booth therefore we'll be happy to talk to you about our open source products, like GeoServer and Mapstore, as well as about our Enterprise Support Services. Moreover, looking at the program, we would like to remind you that we are also giving 2 workshops about our products:

1. Hands - On Introduction To Create Mash - Ups For INSPIRE Services With MapStore, Sunday, the 23th at 11:00 A.M. The workshop will provide users with the basic knowledge to install, administer and proficiently use MapStore in order to create and share mashups that fuse contents served by existing services with a particular focus on INSPIRE View and Download services.
2. Hands-on Introduction to creating INSPIRE services with GeoServer, Monday, the 24th at 02:00 P.M. The workshop will provide a hands on introduction to the GeoServer usage and configuration with particular emphasis on INSPIRE compatibility

and also 2 presentations where solutions developed by GeoSolutions and its partners will be discussed. Here  is the list of presentations with basic information extracted from the program:

1. Opendata and INSPIRE With GeoServer , Geonetwork and Mapstore: Lessons Learned From Real - World Use Cases, Thursday, the 27th at 02:40 P.M. This presentation will report the first-hand experience of implementing and managing SDIs adhering to the INSPIRE technical guidelines to support the demand for OpenData employing well-known Open Source components like GeoServer, GeoNetwork and MapStore. Eventually, we will provide our perspective on benefits as well as shortcomings of the INSPIRE initiative with respect to creating SDI infrastructures suitable for OpenData dissemination. 
2. Destination, an Integrated Solution to Monitor Hazardous Materials Transport Assuring Human and Environmental Protection, Tuesday, the 25th at 4:40 P.M. DESTINATION (DangErous tranSport To New prevenTive Instruments) is a project developed in the framework of Italy/Switzerland Operational Programme for Trans-frontier Cooperation 2007-2013, in order to contribute to inter-regional road accident prevention, real-time monitoring of Dangerous Goods Transportation (DGT) and more efficient emergency management. Partnership includes Regione Piemonte as project leader, Canton Ticino, Regione Lombardia, Regione Autonoma della Valle d’Aosta and Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano. DESTINATION initiative is focused on implementation of a shared information system including environmental, territorial and technical data relevant to meet local authorities and private stakeholders needs

If you are interested in learning about how we can help you achieving your goals with our Open Source products and professionale services, make sure to visit us at our booth 

The GeoSolutions team,

GeoServer presentation @ FOSSGIS 2013

Dear All,
we wanted to share with you the slides of the presentation we  are about to give today @ FOSSGIS 2013.

It contains a brief introduction to GeoServer as well as detailed information about what's been added in the 2.2.x and 2.3.x series. Moreover the final section covers the work that's being performed right now to add new feature or enhance existing ones in the upcoming 2.4.x series. Therefore if you want to have an overview on what GeoServer can do as well as some hints on we are preparing for the near future I would recommend to have a look at it.

So, no more words, here you have the presentation! :)

Fossgis 2013 GeoServer Presentation from GeoSolutions

The GeoSolutions team,

We are hiring!

GeoSolutions is looking for talented people to fill a couple of positions which would mainly involve designing, implementing testing web-based geospatial applications as well as providing support for the Open Source projects we are involved in.

Here below some additional details:

Support Engineer
This position will mainly focus on having our clients receive the support they need in time and with the quality level they expect from us.  The ability to work and communicate clearly in a fast-paced environment is essential since the Support Engineer will be the main point of contact between clients and developers and as such he will be responsible for mediating and coordinating clients' needs. Customers' satisfaction is going to be your mission!

Main Responsibilities are as follows:

• Create documentation and trainings
• Play the Q&A Engineer role when needed
• Monitor quality and SLA levels for support accounts. Manage and improve support procedures as needed
• Coordinate with development team to get updates on ongoing as well as planned planned enhancements for the products
• Interface with development and support teams from GeoSolutions as well as customers to ensure resolution of all customer calls
• Periodically report status and strategic recommendations from clients to GeoSolutions leadership

Qualifications are as follows:

•  1 year in technical support management, including personnel management
•  Familiarity with CRM or issue management systems 
• Working knowledge of GeoServer
• Good Knowledge of most important OGC specifications and concepts (WMS, WFS, WCS, coverage, etc...)
• Working knowledge of OpenLayers is a plus
• Working knowledge of GeoNetwork is a plus

Front End Developer
This position would mainly involve designing and implementing web-based geospatial applications as well as providing support for the Open Source projects we develop.
Qualifications are as follows:

• Working knowledge of OpenLayers and GeoExt
• Working knowledge of frameworks like JQuery,  Ext-JS 
• Working knowledge of HTML5 and development of mapping webapp for the mobile world
• Working knowledge of frameworks like LeafLet, Recline-JS is a plus
• Knowledge of web development with Python is a plus
• Knowledge of Java (JEE and JSE) is desirable but not necessary
• Knowledge of GeoServer is desirable but not necessary
• At least 1 year of experience
• Being fluent in English, both written and spoken

What we offer

We can offer a variety of contracts but, please, notice that our intention is to establish a long term relationship, although as a temporary solution we do accept freelance consultants.

Working remotely is an option we envisage, although we will give priority to candidate closer to our office.

Please send a detailed resume together with a letter of presentation at jobs_at_geo-solutions.it.

The GeoSolutions team,

Developer's Corner: High Performance JPEG Encoder for GeoServer

Dear all,
We would like to talk about some work we did lately to add support in GeoServer for encoding JPEG GetMap responses using the libjpeg-turbo library.

Citing its website the libjpeg-turbo library is a derivative of libjpeg that uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, NEON) to accelerate baseline JPEG compression and decompression on x86, x86-64, and ARM systems. On such systems, libjpeg-turbo is generally 2-4x faster than the unmodified version of libjpeg, all else being equal. I guess it is pretty clear now why we wrote this extension!

The work was done in a quite modular manner. We created an ImageIO Writer and Reader hosted by the ImageIO-Ext Open Source project and then we created a community extension for GeoServer to use the writer for encoding WMS GetMap responses. The extension should work fine on GeoServer 2.2.x, 2.3.x and 2.4.x (a.k.a master).

Documentation has been created as well, check here. Long story short, aside from the usual process for installing an extension (dropping its jars inside the GeoServer WEB-INF/lib directory) it is required to install the native counterpart for libjpeg-turbo for which there is enough instructions on the documentation linked above.

In order to provide some numbers on a typical use case we run a quick set of  performance tests on a normal laptop with some sample data. Here is what we did:

Hardware

• Intel i5 quad-core
• 8GB RAM
• 500 GB HD (7200 RPM)

Software

• GeoServer Master build
• libjpeg-turbo 1.2.1
• Oracle JDK 1.6.0_27 running in server mode

Data

I used a preprocessed geotiff from Natural Earth, here is the gdalinfo on it. The image on disk is a bit more than 1GB. You can find the original geotiff here.

Test Plan

We used the FOSS4G Shootout Python script to generate 700 request for the layer with randomized sizes and resolutions. We then used Apache JMeter from a different machine on the same LAN to simulate the load from 5, 10, 20 and 30 concurrent threads. You can find the original JMeter JMX files here.

Results

You can check the detailed results on this google spreadsheet. 

I am not particularly interested in the absolute values as the results have been collected after a few warm-up runs hence they are extremely good, but the speed up in throughput and (from between 40% and 80%) as well as the decrease in response times (up to 40% in some conditions) is worth to be mentioned.

I reported the original charts from the document here below for quick inspection.

Conclusions

Although the numbers above are not intened by any mean to represent a scientific measure of the performance gain attained using the libjpeg-turbo encoder, they provide some evidence (we have of course used this plugin in a certain nuber of use cases that showed the same behavior...) of the speed-up one would expect, at least on Intel architectures.

Last but not least, we believe it is worth to mention that this work was performed via our GeoSolutions Enterprise Service. Therefore, if you'd like to know more about what we could achieve together, do not hesitate and get in touch with us!

The GeoSolutions team,

Il nostro Corso su GeoServer arriva a Milano!

GeoSolutions è lieta di comunicare i dettagli della nuova tappa italiana del corso su GeoServer!

Il 6 e 7 Giugno 2013 gli sviluppatori core del progetto, staff member di GeoSolutions, terranno un nuovo corso sul server geospaziale Open Source a Milano.

Le due giornate si pongono come obiettivo quello di offrire una panoramica su GeoServer partendo dall'esplorazione delle funzionalità di base fino a toccare gli argomenti più avanzati come l'esplorazione dei trucchi per il deployment in ambienti Enterprise. Il corso è aperto a tutti gli interessati, non si richiedono particolari conoscenze specifiche oltre alla familiarità con i concetti di base del mondo GIS e dei protocolli OGC.

E' possibile reperire le informazioni dettagliate e consultare il programma completo del corso sul sito dedicato. Siamo inoltre lieti di comunicare che sono previsti sconti riservati all'iscrizione di gruppi provenienti dallo stesso ente o azienda, inoltre fino al 30/4 è attivo uno sconto studenti del 20% sul prezzo totale delle due giornate.

Vi aspettiamo a Milano!

The GeoSolutions team,