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

Using the WMS Reflector


This is a great way to preview options in GeoServer without coding a long URL. The reflector will output PNG (the default), JPEG, PNG 8, and GIF. Also, in cases where you don't want to use GeoWebCache, this is quite useful.

The URL passes a number of parameters to specify what output you want. Most of these will not be changed. Reflector uses default values for missing parameters. The only parameter you need to provide is the layers parameter by default. Check out the GeoServer documentation for more information on these values. There's no need to rehash them here.

  1. Let's use the topp:states layer preview for this example. Enter the following URL into your browser or select the JPEG output option from the All Formats drop-down list on the Layer Preview page. The Layer Preview URL is quite long:
      http://localhost:8080/geoserver/topp/wms?  
        service...