Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefano Iacovella
Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Stefano Iacovella

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an opensource server written in Java that allows users to share, process, and edit geospatial data. This book will guide you through the new features and improvements of GeoServer and will help you get started with it. GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you the impetus 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, and apply style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps. Then you follow a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. You will explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as PostGIS, and Oracle. Going ahead, you can display your data on web-based interactive maps, use style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. You will walk away from this book with a working application ready for production. After reading GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will be able to build beautiful custom maps on your website using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Installing required components


Before you can use GeoServer on your machine, you need to install some required pieces of software. GeoServer is a Java application; therefore, one of the most important things you need to ensure is that a Java virtual machine is working on your machine.

There are two main packages of Java. Depending on what you are planning to do with Java, you may want to install a JDK (Java Development Kit) or JRE (Java Runtime Environment).

The former enables you to compile Java code, while the latter has all you need to run most Java applications. Starting from release 2.0, GeoServer does not need a full JDK installation, and you can go safely with JRE. The JDK is only required if you are planning to write and compile Java code. This is the case if you want to modify the GeoServer source code, to fix code, or add functionalities.

Note

This book will not cover developing Java code, but, in this case, you will need more than a Java JDK. You need to set up a full development...