Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide

Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an open source server-side software written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer allows you to display your spatial information to the world. Implementing the Web Map Service (WMS) standard, GeoServer can create maps in a variety of output formats. OpenLayers, a free mapping library, is integrated into GeoServer, making map generation quick and easy. GeoServer is built on Geotools, an open source Java GIS toolkit.GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you a kick start 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, style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps.Follow along through a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. Explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as MySQL, PostGIS, MSSQL, and Oracle. Display your data on web-based interactive maps, style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. Walk away from this book with a working application ready for production.After reading the GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will have beautiful, custom maps on your website built using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
GeoServer Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – adding a GeoServer layer as overlay


One of the most common things you can do with Google Maps API is use their data set as a basemap and add a GeoServer layer on top of the basemap.

You will use the sample code of this chapter, which you can download from the Packt Publishing website.

The Google Maps API doesn't have a method to calculate the BBOX parameters to query GeoServer's WMS server. So we'll need to calculate those on our own based on the x and y coordinates and the zoom level:

  1. Once downloaded, the sample code has to be installed on your server. We can use Tomcat as a web server. Unpack the archive in the /webapps/ROOT folder inside the Tomcat installation folder.

  2. Open your browser and point it to http://localhost:8080/chapter7/index.html.

  3. The page shows a list of links to the sample maps that we will use in this chapter. We will start with a simple map showing the Google basemap with the USA counties layer on top of it. Click on the GeoServer as overlay link to open...