Geoserver and CADRG RPFTOC support

I always wanted to start a blog, but always thought that the things I am doing, learning or discovering are trivial. I am interested in many things. One of the things I like is Geoserver. It is easy to setup and adding new data stores and layers is easy. For me the biggest lack in functionality is the support for the RPF TOC format. GDAL supports this format, however the software layers between GDAL and Geoserver do not have the required functionality. The documentation claims it is is easy to add the missing functionality by implementing a few classes and actually it is really not that hard. I managed to do this in a couple of hours. The patches are submitted to the imageio-ext project (patch 1) and the Geotools project (patch 2), so I expect this functionality to end up in Geoserver in the near future. To my surprise no changes where necessary to Geoserver and the functionality was available after deploying the jar files to the right locations. My compliments to the Geoserver team.

Update: The patch has been committed to imageio-ext and will appear in geoserver. My guess is that is will be in the next version of geoserver (2.2). If you want to try out this new functionality in version 2.1.0 then you can download unsupported patched jar files (download). Install your geoserver 2.1.0 with GDAL support and install the jar files in webapps/geoserver/WEB-INF/lib. Make sure you replace gt-imageio-ext-gdal-2.7.1.jar with gt-imageio-ext-gdal-2.7.1.modified.jar.