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 OpenLayers


The Google Maps API is not the only option to develop a JavaScript mapping application. OpenLayers is one of the oldest and frequently used frameworks. It is an open source project constantly maintained and developed by a growing crowd of enthusiastic developers. As you have noticed, it is used with the GeoServer previews.

The Layer preview uses OpenLayers 2, but the 4.x release has been out for a while. As long as you are building a new mapping application, you should use this release. Although the following examples are basic, they will show you how to incorporate GeoServer data using the WMS protocol.

Integrating GeoServer and OpenLayers

To discover OpenLayers' capabilities, we will start with a simple map interacting with GeoServer WMS as follows:

  1. Open your text editor and create a new file; we will call it basemapWMS.html. As usual, we will start with the basic elements for an HTML file, plus the reference to the OpenLayers library. Paste the following piece of code inside...