About the Authors

Stefano Iacovella is a long-time GIS developer and consultant living in Rome, Italy. He also works as a GIS course instructor.

He has a Ph.D in Geology. Being a very curious person, he has developed a deep knowledge of IT technologies, mainly focused on GIS Software and related standards.

Starting his career as an ESRI employee, he was exposed to and became confident with proprietary GIS Software, mainly the ESRI suite of products.

For the last 10 years, he has been involved with open source software and also the task of integrating it with commercial software. He loves the open source approach, and really trusts in the collaboration and sharing of knowledge. He strongly believes in the concept of open source, and constantly strives to spread it, and not only in the GIS sector.

He has been using GeoServer since the release of Version 1.5; configuring, deploying, and hacking it in several projects. Some of the other GFOSS projects he mainly uses and likes are GDAL/OGR libraries, PostGIS, QGIS, and OpenLayers.

When not playing with maps and geometric shapes, he loves reading about science, mainly physics and math, riding his bike, and having fun with his wife and his two daughters, Alice and Luisa.

I would like to thank many people who have helped me to make this book a reality.

A special mention for GeoServer's developers; they are the wonderful engine without which this book would not exist.

I would like to thank Usha Iyer, Dayan Hyames, Amey Sawant, and everyone else at Packt Publishing for all their hard work to get this book published.

My gratitude to Luca Morandini, a colleague and friend; he spurred me to take this challenge.

Last but not the least, I want to express my gratitude to Alessandra, Alice, and Luisa for their support and patience.

Brian Youngblood is a open source developer living in Montgomery, AL with more than a decade of experience developing, integrating, and managing high traffic websites.

Brian was the Online Operations Manager and Technical Lead at the Southern Poverty Law Center for over 12 years. The SPLC is a nationally recognized nonprofit, and its websites SPLCenter.org and Tolerance.org have continued to get sharp increases in visitors year-on-year, resulting in growth in its online operations with open source. The SPLC won two Webby Awards in 2002 and 2004.

Brian was also the founding partner and Chief Technology Officer for IntelliTours, a GPS-guided multimedia tour. He worked with several companies developing hardware and software including Alcorn McBride, Volkswagen, and Garmin. His work explored San Diego, Santa Cruz, Hawaii, and miles and miles of I-95 on the East Coast. Most notably, his work was featured on the cover of Entertainment Engineering magazine, Martha Stewart radio, the LA Times, and NPR.

Embracing the spirit of other open source communities such as Drupal, and a combined passion for scalable GIS solutions, led him to adopt GeoServer for rapidly changing geospatial data stores.

You can contact him at <[e-mail]> or follow him on twitter @brianyoungblood.

The GeoServer developers and community. So many have contributed to bringing this software to this point. Specifically, Andrea Aime, Chris Holmes, Gabrel Roldan, and David Winslow have fielded my questions on GeoServer's mailing list and in IRC. Their tireless commitment to the GeoServer project has helped me and so many others immensely.

Other contributors are also listed on the contributors page at http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Contributors.

Thank you Melissa Henninger for helping edit and proof chapters. To Bill Fitzgerald for his advice as a Packt author.