\title{MapServer}
\author{Steve Lime, PSC Chair \\ \url{http://www.mapserver.org/}}
\maketitle

\begin{figure}
	 \includegraphics[width=100pt]{annual_report/projects/logo/logo_mapserver.jpg}
\end{figure}

\section{Key Accomplishments}

\begin{itemize}
\item  Project graduated from OSGeo incubation process in December
\item  MapServer 5.2 released in July:
\begin{itemize}
\item  Nearly 200 tickets were closed as part of this effort.
\item  Notable features and enhancements include:
\begin{itemize}
\item  Performance enhancements for large shapefile handling (following Geoserver comparison)
\item  Performance enhancements for AGG rendering (an order of magnitude faster in some cases)
\item  Rendering improvements:
\begin{itemize}
\item  fuzzy label outlines for AGG
\item  style-level opacity for AGG
\item  quantization and palette support for PNGs and RGBA modes
\item  pre-clip label point computation (helps in tile generation) 
\end{itemize}
\item  OGC Web Services:
\begin{itemize}
\item  WCS 1.1.0 support (RFC-41)
\item  SOS 1.0.0 support
\item  WFS 1.1.0 support
\item  Compliance testing (WMS 1.1.1 ready to certify) 
\end{itemize}
\item  proxy and http authentication support for cascaded WMS requests
\item  Support for auth cookie forwarding (RFC-42)
\item  Direct tile generation for Google Maps API (RFC-43)
\item  Native Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Support (RFC-38)
\item  extent (e.g. shpext, mapext) template tag attribute handling
\item  Simplified Template Support for Query Output (MS RFC 36) 
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}
\item  New website launched in December! Quite an improvement for usability and maintainability over the previous site!
\item  We moved from the UMN to OSGeo infrastructure (thanks to UMN for hosting us for all those years!)
\item  We finally got a hold of the \href{http://mapserver.org/}{mapserver.org} domain which has become our new home
\end{itemize}

\section{Areas for Improvement}

\begin{itemize}
\item  Keeping documentation up-to-date with development remains a challenge:
\begin{itemize}
\item  Content is spread between the new website and the MapServer trac wiki and it is unclear when to transition between the two.
\end{itemize}
\item  The project still doesn't do a great job marketing itself at OSGeo conferences.
\item  Google Summer of Code: try to attract some students in the next editions.
\end{itemize}

\section{Opportunities to Help}
\begin{itemize}
\item  general website and documentation maintenance;
\item  multilingual documentation support;
\item  new coders always welcome, a good way to start is by contributing bug reports and patches;
\item  experienced users can contribute to the release process by testing the betas and RCs and reporting their results.
\end{itemize}

\section{Outlook for 2009}

\begin{itemize}
\item  MapServer 5.4 to be released in early March.
\item  Strong presence at the \href{http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Toronto_Code_Sprint_2009}{Toronto Code Sprint} in March where we will focus on 6.0 release features and performance improvements.
\item  MapServer 6.0 release sometimes in the fall (hopefully before FOSS4G).
\item  Reestablish features lost in the website transition (specifically the gallery section).
\end{itemize}
