The GeoTools team is pleased to share the availability GeoTools 26-RC :

This release candidate is also available from the OSGeo Maven Repository and is made in conjunction with GeoServer 2.20-RC and JTS 1.18.2.

A release candidate is your chance to both try out new features and contribute to the project with valuable feedback right when we need it most.

Please test this release with your project and let us know of any regression before we release GeoTools 26 later this month.

There is no specific incompatibilities noted for this release (see User Manual "upgrading" page):

Deprecated HTTPClient interfaces are now removed (previously these were deprecated after being relocated to a new package in the 25.x series)

Each major release is an opportunity to update the libraries that GeoTools uses:

Public service announcement:

remove unsupported epsg-oracle, georest, imagemosiac-jdbc, jdbc-ingres, gtopo30 modules
removed dependency on xpp3 (now use standard StAX API)
main is now the default branch
ongoing quality assurance improvements covering topics from refactoring complicated methods to catching accidentally committed System.out.println statements

From our issue tracker release-notes:

Introduce vendor options for rules
A new vendor option used to mark individual rules, symbolizers, or feature type style elements to be ignored (when rendering Maps or Legends).
WPS 2.0 EMF model and xml binding configuration
GML support has improved for unsupported wfs-ng module, with a separate gt-gml module created for improvements including surface, multi curves, curved polygons and arcs with more than three control points
Krovak North Orientated, used for EPSG:5514
Improve shapefile quadtree build performance

About GeoTools 26 Series

For more information see the release notes ( 26-RC ).

In addition to release notes above, see query for a summary of fixes unique to release-candidate

GeoTools