PostGIS 1.5.0 out and PLR working on Windows 8.3-8.4 installs

PostGIS 1.5.0 is finally out

I'm happy to report that after a long haul, we have finally released PostGIS 1.5.0. Two months late, but there it is, and its a really great release I think; Perhaps the best release ever.

Details on what makes this release so special. The geodetic support.

Summary excerpted from Paul's slightly premature announcement

February 4, 2010

The PostGIS development team has, after a long course of reflection
and a detailed self-examination of our various personal failings,
decided to release PostGIS 1.5.0 to the public.

  http://postgis.org/download/postgis-1.5.0.tar.gz

This new version of PostGIS includes a new "geography" type for
managing geodetic (lat/lon) data, performance-enhanced distance
calculations, GML and KML format readers, an improved shape loading
GUI, and other new features as well.

Especial thanks to:

* Dave Skea for algorithms and mathematics necessary to support
spherical geometry
* Nicklas Avén for the new performance enhanced distance calculations
and other distance-related functions
* Sandro Santilli for new buffering features (end caps and style options)
* Olivier Courtin for GML/KML input functions
* Guillaume Lelarge for support for the upcoming PgSQL 9.0
* George Silva for an example implementation of history tables
* Vincent Picavet for Hausdorff distance calculations
* The maintainers of GEOS, Proj4, and LibXML, without whom we would
have less of a spatial database

Love, the PostGIS project steering committee,

Mark Cave-Ayland
Kevin Neufeld
Regina Obe
Paul Ramsey

Yes evidentally we still have some personal failings to work out :).

More extensive details at http://www.postgis.org/news/20100204/.

PostGIS 1.5.0 Windows binaries and StackBuilder install will be out soon

Leo and I are currently working on the Windows stackbuilder version and hope to have that released sometime next week.

PL/R Now works on PostgreSQL Windows 8.3/8.4 VC++ compiled versions

More great news. Joe Conway has gotten PL/R to compile under VC++ and thus allowing it to work with the standard Windows One-click installers. It is not an option in stack builder yet, but we are hoping there will be one to ease its use. You can download the windows pl/r binaries from the new PL/R Wiki. Once we've gotten caught up in our other activities, you can expect to see on this site a PL/R cheatsheet and examples similar to our PL/Python series.

The final chapters of PostGIS in Action

We are down to writing the last 3 chapters of our book. We are currently working on Chapter 10: PostGIS Add-Ons and ancillary tools and Chapter 11: Using PostGIS in web applications. Chapter 13 on WKT Raster we hope to get to within the next 2 weeks. Joe Conway coming to our rescue is very timely for us for Chapter 10.

Chapter 10 covers PL/R, PL/Python, PgRouting and the new Shapefile Tiger Geocoder reworked by Stephen Frost. We think of Chapter 10 as the Hidden Gems Chapter because it covers features that no other database management system (DBMS) we can think of can compete with PostgreSQL on. Our windows audience is fairly large, so we didn't want to leave them out on being able to exercise any of these rich pieces. Chapter 10 is a really exciting chapter. We've had a lot of fun preparing the examples and writing it so far. We hope people will enjoy reading it and playing with the sample data and exercises.