MapServer 5 Released

From slashgeo: MapServer 5.0.0 has been released.

MapServer is “an open source development environment for building spatially-enabled internet applications.” We’ve released a number of sites with MapServer, and it’s a fantastic web mapping tool - the best I’ve worked with of its type. We’ve found it to be far faster and more stable than our proprietary, high dollar solutions.

There are a lot of new features in this release. From the announcement:

Perhaps the most important new feature in this release is support for map rendering using the Anti-grain Geometry (AGG) graphics library (www.antigrain.com). AGG brings high quality 2-D rendering capabilities to MapServer that will allow users to create maps with vastly improved cartographic quality. Equally important is that using AGG results in a minimal reduction in performance. All symbology supported by the default GD (www.libgd.org) graphics library are also supported using AGG. We are excited about the future possibilities of bringing high-end cartography to on-demand web mapping.

This new version also includes dozens of small bug fixes, enhancements and performance improvements. Among the new features are: style and label attribute binding; lookup table-based raster color correction; dynamic charting (pie and bar); explicit label prioritizing; enhanced debugging and logging; dynamic allocation for layers, classes, styles and symbols; improved memory management and garbage collection for MapScript; numerous improvements to OGC specification support, and lots more.


This is a major new release, so if you are an existing MapServer user, take your time. There’s a MapServer 4.x to 5.x migration guide here.


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