Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth's surface. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you'll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums and coordinate systems. Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. Python Geospatial Development teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources and toolkits. It teaches you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Because maps are such an important aspect of geospatial programming, the book teaches you how to build your own “slippy map” interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using Geodjango. Whether you want to write quick utilities to solve spatial problems, or develop sophisticated web applications based around maps and geospatial data, this book includes everything you need to know.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Further improvements and enhancements


As with any new application, there are a number of ways in which the ShapeEditor could be improved. For example:

  • Adding user signup and login, so that each user has his or her own private set of shapefiles, rather than every user seeing the entire list of all the uploaded shapefiles.

  • Adding the ability to edit a feature's attribute values.

  • Using a higher resolution base map. An obvious candidate for this would be the GSHHS high-resolution shoreline database.

  • Adding a tile cache for our TMS server.

  • Using JavaScript to add a please wait pop-up message while a shapefile is being imported or exported.

  • Improving the reusability of the ShapeEditor's codebase. We've concentrated on learning how to use GeoDjango to build a working system, but with a suitable redesign the code could be made much more generic so that it could be used in other applications as well.

Feel free to make these improvements; you will learn a lot more about GeoDjango, and about geospatial development...