Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide

Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an open source server-side software written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer allows you to display your spatial information to the world. Implementing the Web Map Service (WMS) standard, GeoServer can create maps in a variety of output formats. OpenLayers, a free mapping library, is integrated into GeoServer, making map generation quick and easy. GeoServer is built on Geotools, an open source Java GIS toolkit.GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you a kick start to build custom maps using your data without the need for costly commercial software licenses and restrictions. Even if you do not have prior GIS knowledge, you will be able to make interactive maps after reading this book.You will install GeoServer, access your data from a database, style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps.Follow along through a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. Explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as MySQL, PostGIS, MSSQL, and Oracle. Display your data on web-based interactive maps, style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. Walk away from this book with a working application ready for production.After reading the GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will have beautiful, custom maps on your website built using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
GeoServer Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Accessing data and services


GeoServer supports access and control, both at the service level, allowing for the lockdown of service operations to only authenticated users who have been granted a particular role, and on a per-layer basis.

The two approaches can't be mixed. If you lock down a service to a role, you can't grant the access on a specific layer to the same role.

When working with layers, you can define rules that specify what a role can do on any specific layer. The operations controlled are the view, write, and admin access. When granting read access on a layer, you enable a user to add it on a map; while granting write access you enable the user to update, create, and delete features contained in the layer. The admin access level enables the user to update the layer's configuration.

Have a go hero – creating a new shapefile

For the next Time for action section, we need a layer to perform editing. We already have a bunch of layers loaded from the Natural Earth data sets, but we will...