Book Image

GeoServer Cookbook

By : Stefano Iacovella
Book Image

GeoServer Cookbook

By: Stefano Iacovella

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
GeoServer Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Maps are a powerful representation of data. To produce a beautiful map, very often, you need to use a lot of symbols. For instance, dashing lines for roads under construction, lines with hatching for railroads, appropriate filling for swamps, and points for caves and mines. A map can contain dozens of different symbols; it's your way of expressing your idea of a part of the world to other people.

A standard way to produce maps with GeoServer is using WMS configured with appropriate styles.

Note

WMS lets you define styles with Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD); see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styled_Layer_Descriptor.

While SLD is a powerful tool and enables you to create complex and pretty rendering of data, it is also famous for being quite hard to write and understand for humans.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) (see 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...