Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you’ll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums, and coordinate systems. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Further on, the book teaches you how to build your own slippy map interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using the GeoDjango framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently use Python to write your own geospatial applications ranging from quick, one-off utilities to sophisticated web-based applications using maps and other geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Tools for Web-based Geospatial Development

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...