Mapnik 0.7.0 Released

The Mapnik team have released version 0.7.0 of their open source map toolkit. The release targets stability and usability of the Mapnik Core and brings notable advancements to the Datasource Plugins. It also brings improvements and fixes to the C++ core that warrant a major release and new a ABI version.

Plugins

• Addition of GDAL raster overviews – You can now rapidly read large raster datasets

- Turn multiple geotiffs into a Bigtiff and build overviews with gdaladdo then read with the GDAL plugin.

• Huge set of improvements to PostGIS Plugin

- The PostGIS plugin now supports custom placement of the BBOX query
- It is is able to skip initialization queries if you supply the ‘geometry_field’,’srid’,or ‘extent’
- Errors are now thrown for queries with invalid syntax – should help in debugging complex SQL

Python

• Additional support for python pickling (near complete)

- Map pickling still needs some refinement, but most objects are nicely pickleable now

• Improvements to Python linking on Mac OSX

- Smarter default linking to the right Python framework (helps if multiple versions exist like on Snow Leopard +   python 2.6)

• Improvements to python docstrings

Core

• Completed adding full support for PPC/ Big endian systems

- Ability to read binary data was completed for 0.6.1, but color support needed work and is now finished

• Large extension to TextSymbolizer functionality by David Eastcott  and Jochen
• New support for semitransparency in png256 output
• New ‘gamma’ attribute on PolygonSymbolizer to allow for seamless polygon edges
• Support for writing map xml to string

- Call mapnik.save_map_to_string(m) to send a map to an xml stream

• Support for relative paths in xml loaded from string

- Works with libxml2 entities even! Thanks Dražen!
- Tested with the latest OSM stylesheet.

• Variety of bug and usability fixes

View Changelog

Download: Mapnik 0.7.0