Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefano Iacovella
Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Stefano Iacovella

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an opensource server written in Java that allows users to share, process, and edit geospatial data. This book will guide you through the new features and improvements of GeoServer and will help you get started with it. GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you the impetus 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, and apply style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps. Then you follow a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. You will explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as PostGIS, and Oracle. Going ahead, you can display your data on web-based interactive maps, use style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. You will walk away from this book with a working application ready for production. After reading GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will be able to build beautiful custom maps on your website using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Exploring additional data sources


GeoServer supports several optional formats beyond the built-in data sources. In the remaining part of this chapter, we will explore a quite popular RDBMS that supports spatial data--Oracle.

Using Oracle

Oracle is probably the most widely used commercial RDBMS. It has support for spatial data since release 7, back in the 1980s. The current release, 12, comes with two flavors of spatial data extensions--Oracle Spatial and Oracle Locator. They share the same geometry type and a basic set of operators and functions. Oracle Spatial incorporates a richer set of functions for spatial analysis. Oracle is not free open source software, such as GeoServer or PostGIS, and it has a quite complicated and expensive license model. We will not cover installation here; as long as you are using Oracle, you should have the expertise and/or a proper budget to have it up and running.

Note

If you want to try Oracle, and you don't have a commercial license available, you may consider...