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

Styling with CSS


In this chapter, you learned a lot about SLD and how to use its elements to produce graphical effects on your maps. While SLD is a powerful tool and enables you to create a complex and pretty rendering of data, it is also famous for being quite hard to write and understand for humans.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS) is a convenient and easier replacement alternative to long SLD documents. When using CSS, you must be aware that this is GeoServer specific.

While SLD is a standard approach that can be reused with other WMS implementations or a desktop application such as QGIS, CSS is a GeoServer-specific module. For instance, you can't use the CSS syntax with MapServer, but you can, of course, reuse the styles on another GeoServer WMS server, assuming that layers with similar details are published on them.

If you followed the instructions at the start of this chapter, you already installed the CSS module; so, now we are ready to duplicate the thematic...