In this chapter, we will learn about various tools and techniques that can be used to develop geospatial applications that run in a user's web browser. Web-based applications are becoming increasingly popular, and there is a huge potential for geospatial development based on this technology.
We will start our examination of web-based geospatial development with an overview of the tools and techniques that can be used both for web application development in general and geospatial web application development in particular. We will look at web applications, web services, the concept of a "slippy map", and a number of standard protocols for sharing and manipulating geospatial data across the Internet.
We will then turn our attention to three particular tools and techniques that will be used to develop a complete geospatial web application in the final three chapters of this book: the TMS protocol, OpenLayers, and the GeoDjango web application...