09.24.07

GeoServer Tutorials from FOSS4G

Posted in Announcements, Tutorials at 7:16 pm by Chris Holmes

Just quick note, the GeoServer team just put on a new workshop at FOSS4G.  The conference is just getting started, but after we finish up here we’ll work in the coming weeks to make those materials more generic and available to all.  For those who want a preview, or those in the workshop who want to follow up on what they’ve done, the materials are available in the docs at FOSS4G 2007 Workshop.  In time these should result in some nice new high quality documentation.  Thanks to everyone who attended and provided feedback on the software and the workshop.

If you’re at the conference and are using GeoServer do swing by The Open Planning Project’s booth in section A, a number of us should be there at most times.  There are also a number of talks, and we’ve now got the times for them:

We also encourage you to check out Tim Schaub’s OpenLayers - Agile Geography in a Browser talk, which will include an application built with GeoServer’s versioning capabilities.  After his talk we’ll post it live for people to preview, so see it there first.

08.12.07

GeoServer’s Google Earth abilities featured on Oracle.com

Posted in Tutorials at 8:00 pm by Chris Holmes

Just recently Justin Lokitz of Leica published a new article on Oracle’s Technology Network entitled ‘Integrating Oracle Spatial with Google Earth‘.  We were quite pleased to find that instead of telling people how to hand code some scripts for one-off KML his article instead highlighted the capabilities of GeoServer, demonstrating how it can be leveraged to easily connect Oracle Spatial to Google Earth.  He additionally follows up with a post on his blog, containing a few corrections and updates on our latest improvements.  Users of Oracle Spatial will certainly find his information quite helpful.  And it’s great to see articles on GeoServer coming from all sorts of different perspectives, aimed at different audiences.  If you’ve got an urge to write about GeoServer let us know and we’re more than happy to promote it and to find venues to publish in.

05.03.07

Open Web Mapping Course from Penn State

Posted in Tutorials at 3:05 pm by Chris Holmes

While others have mentioned this, I figured it was worthwhile to point out here, as there’s a lot of great tutorial information on GeoServer contained in Ian Turton’s new Open Web Mapping Course. He managed to get the content released under a creative commons license, so all are able to make use of his great work.

The other highlight is all the student projects, that are mostly built with GeoServer. They are some great examples of what’s possible with GeoServer. If anyone else has interesting sites they’ve built with GeoServer, please let us know. We’d like to start an interactive gallery soon, and these definitely make for a solid start.

02.26.07

TileCache Tutorial

Posted in Tutorials at 3:57 pm by Chris Holmes

One of the nicest little pieces of software we’ve come across in the last few months has been MetaCarta’s TileCache, which performs a very specific job - caching WMS requests for use in clients that understand tiles - and does it very well. We are making good use of it on our demo site, to give an even better user experience in terms of the speed the map shows up.

Chris and Schuyler gave lots of advice on how to use it in conjunction with OpenLayers, so we thought it’d be worthwhile to write up a new tutorial for GeoServer users looking to make use of it. And there are a few tips and tricks that will likely be useful to others, especially some of the nice things you can do in OpenLayers that make it work better with TileCache, like setting multiple host names to cheat the browsers connection limit and setting OL to try to reload when it gets pink tiles.

We hope to eventually be able to ship a nice integrated GeoServer plug-in that will run a TileCache with a nice GUI and enable easy integration with nice distributed java caches. The ideal would be to share code with TileCache and run in jython, but if that’s not possible we will likely do a hand port and leverage JAI. A big kudos to the MetaCarta programmers, it’s a very nice piece of code.

02.04.07

New Coverage Tutorials

Posted in Tutorials at 3:05 pm by Brent Owens

In light of our upcoming official 1.5 release, we have made a couple tutorials about Coverages to assist in the transition. For beginners, we have a tutorial that walks through the basic steps of adding a TIFF dataset to GeoServer. And then for the more advanced user, there is a tutorial on creating and adding an image mosaic to GeoServer.

We have also updated our other documentation to tie in coverages, but if you see any gaps in the documentation or would like more information on coverages or various data formats, drop us a line here on the blog or on the mailing list.

01.04.07

Google Earth and GeoServer

Posted in Tutorials at 5:54 pm by Brent Owens

As some of you may know, GeoServer can serve up WMS data as KML or KMZ for Google Earth. There is a full video tutorial located here on how to set it up.

One of the tools GeoServer has to make serving up KML/KMZ easier is a reflector script. This exists so people don’t have to type in an entire WMS request URL to view the data in Google Earth. Here is an example of its use:

http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wms/kml_reflect?layers=states

By using this URL, you can ignore all the other WMS information. Information such as projection, image size, output format etc. You can also specify more than one layer by just separating the layer names with commas: layers=states,roads,lakes

The reflector will take the layer names and fill in the missing information, then return back a full WMS request. Users have asked why a URL is being returned when they use the reflector in their web browser. The reflector is meant to be used within Google Earth in a Network Link. The network link will interpret the returned WMS request and send it off again to GeoServer to get the real KML data back. So at first it makes two requests to get the real data, but after that it updates with just one get map request.

One recent item of discussion has been how to format the description of the features that are returned. In KML you can return an HTML description of the data.

ge attributes

What we do is take all of the feature information and put it into an HTML table that pops up when you click on the feature. But say if you wanted to hide some of the attribution, or turn some value into hyper links, there is no current way to do this (at least with not hacking the code). A few ideas have been suggested: including the formatting information into the SLD file, have a separate SLD-like file for just the descriptions, and XML transforms with a template document. In order to make a decision on which path to take, we would like some input from the users: use-case scenarios, requirements, etc.

So drop us a line and tell us what you think.

11.27.06

Hello GeoServer World

Posted in Tips and Tricks, Announcements, Developer notes, Tutorials at 11:42 am by Brent Owens

Hello GeoServer fans and developers, this is our first of many GeoServer blog posts. Here we will tell you about the latest news and updates, along with open discussions on where GeoServer is headed. You will also find posts about the latest tutorials and documentation, as well as our new screencasts. For the technically savvy reader, this blog will also contain posts from the developers discussing everything from software design, frameworks, services, and of course, GIS.

This blog is ideal for those who don’t want to sift through the email list to see what is going on in GeoServer-land. And to make your life easier there are four categories of blog posts that you can filter:

- Announcements: Releases, updates, patches, and major decisions will be here.

- Tutorials: New tutorials and FAQ entries will be announced on this thread.

- Tips and Tricks: Tips from the developers and user community on how to tweak GeoServer.

- Developer Notes: Mostly technical notes from the developer community. Topics such as design decisions, frameworks, OGC standards, and various technical discussions.

You can read the About page to find out more information on subscribing to particular message feeds..

Suggestions for blog entries are definitely welcome. And if you would like to be an author to this blog, we invite you to contact the administrator to get registered.