Until now, we have concentrated on GeoServer's ability to serve raster and vector data from file stores and spatial databases. For a large number of use cases, rendering a map for a web application is sufficient. However, there are use cases where one might like to perform server-side spatial analysis and then render the results to the client. As soon as you mention server-side spatial analysis, most people will assume that you need to spend a small fortune to implement a cluster of ArcGIS for server instances to perform Geoprocessing operations. However, GeoServer has a number of tricks up its sleeves that can be used to perform almost any form of spatial analysis you can imagine. With a little bit of effort, GeoServer can challenge any commercial server-side spatial analysis toolkit.
In this chapter, we will look at different approaches to server-side spatial analysis that GeoServer can perform. We will cover the following topics:
Understanding...