The GeoTrellis team has been has been hard at work for the past few months, adding new geographic analysis operations and otherwise improving the performance of Azavea’s open source toolkit for high performance geoprocessing. The team just celebrated the completion of its version 0.8 “release candidate” this month. A release candidate is not a final release of software, but a preliminary product with mostly completed features that the open source community and developers can test and evaluate for bugs, stability, and user feedback before a final, complete, “full release” is launched later. In addition to stabilizing the software, in the next few weeks the GeoTrellis team will be working on a completely redesigned getting started and tutorial website that will accompany the full version 0.8 release in a few weeks time.

So, if you have a technical interest, want to tinker with some Scala or would like to help the GeoTrellis community out, download the latest GeoTrellis 0.8 release candidate and submit feedback or questions you have to the developer mailing list. Features in the new 0.8 release candidate include:

–          A new sets of raster processing operations – Focal operations – plus support for executing both Focal and Zonal operations in parallel or distributed environments

–          Revamped vector processing support and a suite of vector operations

–          Enhanced performance and scalability

We’ve also updated the getting started guide, but stay tuned because we’ll doing the full release in a few weeks!