PostGIS 1.4.0 Beta 1

The PostGIS team is super happy to announce that a beta release of
PostGIS 1.4.0 is now available for download and testing!

http://postgis.refractions.net/download/postgis-1.4.0b1.tar.gz

The 1.4 series includes a large number of new features, fixes,
speed-ups and mini chocolate chip cookies.

PostGIS 1.4 is best consumed along side helpings of the latest Proj4
and GEOS libraries:

http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.6.1.tar.gz
http://download.osgeo.org/geos/geos-3.1.0.tar.bz2

We appreciate all possible testing and feed-back you can provide to
make the upcoming 1.4 release a high quality affair. The sooner we get
feedback, the sooner we can release 1.4.0!

Here are some more details about 1.4:

- API Stability
- As of the 1.4 release series, the public API of PostGIS will not
change during minor releases.

- Compatibility
- The versions below are the *minimum* requirements for PostGIS 1.4
- PostgreSQL 8.2 and higher on all platforms
- GEOS 3.0 and higher only
- PROJ4 4.5 and higher only

- New Features
- ST_Union() uses high-speed cascaded union when compiled against
GEOS 3.1+ (Paul Ramsey)
- ST_ContainsProperly() requires GEOS 3.1+
- ST_Intersects(), ST_Contains(), ST_Within() use high-speed cached
prepared geometry against GEOS 3.1+ (Paul Ramsey)
- Vastly improved documentation and reference manual
(Regina Obe & Kevin Neufeld)
- Figures and diagram examples in the reference manual (Kevin Neufeld)
- ST_IsValidReason() returns readable explanations for validity
failures (Paul Ramsey)
- ST_GeoHash() returns a geohash.org signature for geometries
(Paul Ramsey)
- GTK+ multi-platform GUI for shape file loading (Paul Ramsey)
- ST_LineCrossingDirection() returns crossing directions (Paul Ramsey)
- ST_LocateBetweenElevations() returns sub-string based on Z-ordinate.
(Paul Ramsey)
- Geometry parser returns explicit error message about location of
syntax errors (Mark Cave-Ayland)
- ST_AsGeoJSON() return JSON formatted geometry (Olivier Courtin)
- Populate_Geometry_Columns() -- automatically add records to
geometry_columns for TABLES and VIEWS (Kevin Neufeld)

- Enhancements
- Core geometry system moved into independent library, liblwgeom.
(Mark Cave-Ayland)
- New build system uses PostgreSQL "pgxs" build bootstrapper.
(Mark Cave-Ayland)
- Debugging framework formalized and simplified. (Mark Cave-Ayland)
- All build-time #defines generated at configure time and placed in
headers for easier cross-platform support (Mark Cave-Ayland)
- Logging framework formalized and simplified (Mark Cave-Ayland)
- Expanded and more stable support for CIRCULARSTRING,
COMPOUNDCURVE and CURVEPOLYGON, better parsing, wider support
in functions (Mark Leslie & Mark Cave-Ayland)
- Improved support for OpenSolaris builds (Paul Ramsey)
- Improved support for MSVC builds (Mateusz Loskot)
- Updated KML support (Olivier Courtin)
- Unit testing framework for liblwgeom (Paul Ramsey)
- New testing framework to comprehensively exercise every PostGIS
function (Regine Obe)
- Performance improvements to all geometry aggregate functions
(Paul Ramsey)
- Support for the upcoming PostgreSQL 8.4 (Mark Cave-Ayland, Talha Bin
Rizwan)
- Shp2pgsql and pgsql2shp re-worked to depend on the common
parsing/unparsing code in liblwgeom (Mark Cave-Ayland)
- Use of PDF DbLatex to build PDF docs and preliminary instructions
for build (Jean David Techer)
- Automated User documentation build (PDF and HTML) and
Developer Doxygen Documentation (Kevin Neufeld)
- Automated build of document images using ImageMagick
from WKT geometry text files (Kevin Neufeld)
- More attractive CSS for HTML documentation (Dane Springmeyer)
- Bug fixes
- http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/query?status=closed&milestone=postgis+1.4.0&order=priority