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

Working with point symbols


We will start with a basic example. What is the simplest geometry type? A point feature; hence, we will start with styles for point features. The Populated places shapefile fits our purposes perfectly. Did you publish it using the default style for points? If you did it, you should see it rendered with a small red square, as shown in the following screenshot:

To modify the map, you need to add a new style and associate it to the layer. For setting point symbol properties, you have to use the <PointSymbolizer> element and its children.

Creating a simple point style

To familiarize you with SLD file creation, we will compose a simple style to apply a small red circle to all the point features:

  1. Open your favorite text editor. We will expect you have already inserted the XML declaration and the <StyledLayerDescriptor> part of the code. So, start by inserting a <NamedLayer> element. Then, add a <Name> element and write the name you want for your layer...