The GeoTools team is pleased to share the availability of GeoTools 24.4 :
This release is published to the osgeo maven repository, and is made in conjunction with  GeoServer 2.18.4. This is a maintenance release and is a recommended upgrade for all users of the GeoTools library.
We would like to thank everyone who contributed to this release.
 
Highlights from our issue tracker release-notes:
Bug fixes
- GEOT-6916 "WGS 84 / UPS South (N,E)" is rendered with flipped axis
 - GEOT-6912 Special characters in shp file name are not correctly encoded
 - GEOT-6899 Resource (CPU/Heap) starvation building shapefile spatial index
 - GEOT-6898 Read only GeoPackages fail when using the new GPKG application id
 - GEOT-6886 Raster to Vector rendering transformations with reprojection can generate incorrect images
 - GEOT-6885 RasterAsPointCollectionProcess hemisphere error with some projections
 - GEOT-6883 Fix edge cases in the date time parser
 - GEOT-6880 Rendering process fails if vendor option sortByGroup is used
 - GEOT-6860 SchemaCache doesn't follow redirect when downloading from HttpConnection
 - GEOT-6856 Replace new Collection method invocation via reflection with new ArrayList in ComplexAttributeImpl class
 
Improvements
- GEOT-6900 Shapefile quadtree build performance
 - GEOT-6877 Upgrade to imageio-ext 1.3.6 (tiff 32 bit with deflate/lzw support)
 - GEOT-6874 Add support for count distinct aggregations in gt-jdbc
 
New Feature
- GEOT-6867 Add the possibility to prune Rule, Symbolizer, FeatureTypeStyle elements when rendering Maps or Legends
 
About GeoTools 24 Series
For more information see the release notes ( 24.3 | 24.2 | 24.1 | 24.0 | 24-RC ).