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

Putting it all together


A common map contains more than a layer, each one styled with one or more symbols according to its complexity and the map purpose. How can you create a multilayer document with SLD? You can't. As the acronym states, an SLD document can contain a rule relative to just one layer.

By publishing your layers with one or more styles associated on GeoServer, you can compose a map with an external client supporting a WMS protocol, for example, an OpenLayers JavaScript client or a desktop GIS such as QGIS.

Another possibility offered by GeoServer is the layer group. A layer group is a set of layers with a drawing order. Using layer groups, you can compose and publish a full map as if it was a single layer. Your client will have to do a single WMS request to get all the layers.

Grouping layers

To compose a full map, we will use a couple of styles created in this chapter and one bundled with GeoServer. We will not create new styles; it is just a matter of selecting layers and setting...