The GeoServer team announces the release of GeoServer 1.7.0, available for download. This is a very big release for GeoServer as the 1.7.x series brings some new features and improvements.
Security in 1.7 has been improved by allowing access control at the layer/feature type level, in addition to the service level. This allows users to secure data in a much more granular way.
There has also been much work done to better performance for GeoServer 1.7. The short of which is faster rendering with WMS, as well as faster data access with Shapefile, PostGIS, and ArcSDE.
For those interested in the specifics check out the presentation given by Andrea Aime at FOSS4G this year in South Africa. Also of note for this release is a retrofit of the built in OpenLayers map preview. The preview interface now allows for filtering and controlling various rendering aspects such as anti-aliasing and image format.
As the GeoServer community expands, so does the number of translations to support other languages. 1.7 brings a Dutch and a Russian translation.
Some major improvements have been done to the GeoServer core which will act as building blocks for features in future releases. This involves a change to the internal feature model which now allows the modeling of complex feature relationships; something that gets us closer to achieving full community schema support.
There have also been changes to the back-end configuration subsystem which now has a much cleaner API for developers writing plug-ins and user interface components. It will also serve as the base for supporting additional persistence mechanisms such as hibernate and other O/R mappers.
Fore more information, please visit http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/GeoServer+1.7.0