Mapnik is a useful cross-platform toolset that will make it possible for anyone interested in developing apps for desktop and web environments which involve the use of various maps.
In order to work with multiple data sources, Mapnik was built to be able to handle ESRI shapefiles, PostGIS, OGR/GDAL, OSM xml, TIFF raster, as well as Kismet formats thanks to its extensible plugin arhitecture.
What's New in This Release:
· Removed 3 depedencies without loosing any functionality: `ltdl`, `cairomm` and `libsigc++` (#1804,#806,#1681)
· Added 64 bit integer support in expressions, feature ids, and the grid_renderer (#1661,#1662,#1662)
· Added the ability to disable the need for various dependencies: `proj4`, `libpng`, `libtiff`, `libjpeg`
· Added faster reprojection support between `epsg:3857` and `epsg:4326` (#1705,#1703,#1579)
· Fixed concurrency problem when using cursors in postgis plugin (#1823,#1588)
· Fixed postgres connection pool leaks when using `persist_connection=false` (#1764)
· Fixed postgres connection key to respect highest value of `max_size` and `initial_size` for any layer in map (#1599)
· Fixed potential crash in wkb parsing when postgis returns null geometry (#1843)
· Fixed blurry rendering of image and SVG icons (#1316)
· Added detection of invalid srs values when loading xml (#646)
· Added support for specifying a base_path as a third, optional argument to load_xml
· Removed muffling of projection errors ...