Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide

Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an open source server-side software written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer allows you to display your spatial information to the world. Implementing the Web Map Service (WMS) standard, GeoServer can create maps in a variety of output formats. OpenLayers, a free mapping library, is integrated into GeoServer, making map generation quick and easy. GeoServer is built on Geotools, an open source Java GIS toolkit.GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you a kick start 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, style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps.Follow along through a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. Explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as MySQL, PostGIS, MSSQL, and Oracle. Display your data on web-based interactive maps, style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. Walk away from this book with a working application ready for production.After reading the GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will have beautiful, custom maps on your website built using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
GeoServer Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
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! But 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 the programming language, Python, and with 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 tools allow users to create REST...