Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. 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. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing 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. Further on, 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 the GeoDjango framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently use Python to write your own geospatial applications ranging from quick, one-off utilities to sophisticated web-based applications using maps and other geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Tools and techniques for geospatial web development


While web browsers were initially designed to show static HTML pages, they are now a sophisticated programming environment in their own right. Complex applications can now be implemented in JavaScript running on the user's web browser, interacting with server-side APIs and web services to perform tasks that previously could only be implemented using complex standalone systems.

Web application development has transformed the programming landscape, and geospatial developers have not been left behind. In this section, we will learn about web application development and see how these technologies can be applied to build sophisticated geospatial systems that run within the user's web browser.

Web applications

There are many ways in which you can develop a web-based application. You can write your own code by hand, for example as a series of CGI scripts or you can use one of the many web application frameworks available. In this section, we will...