Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Creating WMS and WFS services with GeoServer


In the previous recipe, you created WMS and WFS from a PostGIS layer using MapServer. In this recipe, you will do it using another popular open source web-mapping engine-GeoServer. You will then use the created services as you did with MapServer, testing their exposed requests, first using a browser and then the QGIS desktop tool (you can do this with other software, such as uDig, gvSIG, OpenJUMP GIS, and ArcGIS Desktop).

Getting ready

While MapServer is written in the C language and uses Apache as its web server, GeoServer is written in Java and you therefore need to install the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in your system; it must be used from a servlet container, such as Jetty and Tomcat. After installing the servlet container, you will be able to deploy the GeoServer application to it. For example, in Tomcat, you can deploy GeoServer by copying the GeoServer WAR (web archive) file to Tomcat's webapps directory. For this recipe, we will suppose...