Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth's surface. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you'll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums and coordinate systems. Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. Python Geospatial Development teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources and toolkits. It teaches you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Because maps are such an important aspect of geospatial programming, the book teaches you how to build your own “slippy map” interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using Geodjango. Whether you want to write quick utilities to solve spatial problems, or develop sophisticated web applications based around maps and geospatial data, this book includes everything you need to know.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we finished implementing a sophisticated geospatial web application using GeoDjango, Mapnik, PostGIS, OGR, and pyproj. This application is useful in its own right, as well as being a springboard to developing your own geospatial web applications.

We have learned:

  • That we can easily create our own Tile Map Server using Mapnik and GeoDjango.

  • That we can include OpenLayers on our own web pages, independent of GeoDjango, and display map data from our Tile Map Server.

  • How to create a custom "click handler" to respond to mouse-clicks within an OpenLayers map.

  • That we can use AJAX calls to have the server respond to events within the web browser.

  • That GeoDjango provides a powerful query language for performing spatial queries without writing a single line of SQL.

  • How to "borrow" geometry editing widgets from GeoDjango and use them within your own web application.

  • That you can create your own GeoModelAdmin subclass to change the appearance and functionality of GeoDjango's geometry...