Today, Artem Pavlenko – the leader of Mapnik project – announced new release of Mapnik 0.3.0. Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. New version brings rich set of new features.

Here I pasted Artem’s e-mail posted on the FreeGIS list:

I’m pleased to announce a new release of Mapnik – 0.3.0. It’s been a
long time but we have lots of new features, bug fixes, improvements.

Here are the major features:
1. License changed from GPL to LGPL
2. Python-based WMS server (WMS 1.1.1 and 1.3.0)
3. New Renderer interface
4. New Feature model
5. Font engine and text symbolization
6. Python and C++ demos
7. win32 support – yes, mapnik can be compiled (tested with vc-8_0) and happily runs on windows now. (In the future win32 binaries and/or build instructions will be provided)
8. x86_64 support

If you’d like to see what Mapnik can do for you, look at its styling capabilities.