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

Exploring further Web Map Service output formats


The OpenLayers format is a special case. Indeed, when you ask for it, GeoServer is not answering with a single object, but with a full web application. As you learned, the application then issues other WMS requests to get a representation of the map.

In the following sections, we will discover what formats you can use and which are best suited for your applications.

The AtomPub format

The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) format is a XML-based output. Also known as a Vector output type, it is comparable to RSS feeds, which are more common. It allows others to subscribe to features published by GeoServer. The output format is specified by application/atom+xml as the format parameter value.

The GIF format

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) output format is well-known. It has been around for a long time on the Web. This format only supports 256 colors, so it is rarely used for high-quality images. In some cases, it is useful when simple shape...