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

Using REST


REST defines a set of operations defined from the HTTP protocol; so, how can you interact with it? Using a browser can be a common way to send HTTP requests to a server; you do it almost every day when you browse the internet, and you do it with the GeoServer web interface! However, using a browser is not a simple way to automate tasks; it requires human interaction. We need something that enables us to build small programs.

A lot of different tools exist that enable you to interact with REST. You can use programming languages such as Java or PHP, or script languages such as PowerShell in Windows or any Linux shell. In this chapter, we will see examples in a programming language, Python, and with a command-line utility, cURL. Python is a programming language that leverages on simplicity and code readability, and, hence, it is very easy to create small programs with it. cURL is a library and a command-line tool that can be easily incorporated in simple shell scripts. Both of these...