Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

By : Kastanakis
Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

By: Kastanakis

Overview of this book

Maps are an essential element in today’s location aware applications. Right from displaying earth surface information to creating thematic maps displaying plethora of information, most of the developers lack the necessary knowledge to create customizable maps with combination of various tools and libraries. The MapBox platform is one such platform which offers all the tools and API required to create and publish a totally customizable map. Starting with building your first map with the online MapBox Editor, we will take you all the way to building advanced web and mobile applications with totally customizable map styles. Through the course of chapters we’ll learn CartoCSS styling language and understand the various components of MapBox platform and their corresponding JavaScript API. In the initial few chapters we will dive deeper into the TileMill and MapBox Studio components of MapBox and use them to generate custom styled map tiles and vector maps. Furthermore, we will publish these custom maps using PHP, node.js and third party tools like Geoserver. We’ll also learn to create different visualizations and map styles like a choropleth map, a heat map and add user interactivity using a UFTGrid. Moving on, we dive into advanced concepts and focus on integration with third party services like Foursquare, Google FusionTables, CartoDB, and Torque to help you populate and even animate your maps. In the final chapter we’ll learn to use the Mapbox SDK to create and publish interactive maps for the iOS platform. By the end of this book, you will learn about MapBox GL and how to create a fully functional, location-aware mobile app, using the maps styles created in the recipes.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)
7
Index

Adding a WMS layer from GeoServer to your map


In the previous recipe, we learned how to use CartoDB georeferenced data and draw it over time. In this recipe, we will learn how we can serve WMS layers using GeoServer.

Note

While GeoServer is one of the most popular options, there are other great alternatives for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications, such as MapServer. You can find more information about MapServer at the official website at http://mapserver.org.

GeoServer is an open source server for serving geospatial data. WMS is georeferenced images used to display data that can't be easily represented using markers. An example is meteorological data such as clouds, winds, or surface heat maps.

How to do it…

The steps to be performed can be categorized in the following sections.

Adding WMS images from GeoServer to your map

First we will install GeoServer.

Installing GeoServer

We will first download and install GeoServer. It's freely available for Windows, Linux, and OS X...