Geoserver and WMS

Question

Hi,

I need some help. I am new to the concept of Geoserver and WMS and I am looking for very basic help. I have downloaded and installed Geoserver, set up layers etc (including sld), however, I have no idea how to get this information from here to my website. As I have mentioned I am new to this and have no idea what I am doing, I have tried searching the web for step by step help, but most simply miss out how to or what to do once you have your shapefiles uploaded and stored on Geoserver.

Any help or pointing in the right direction of information would be most appreciated.

Thanks

Steve

Answer 1

Geoserver can run either using its own web server (jetty), or as a ".war archive" for Tomcat. That is, to deploy it on your web server, you will have to install the software on the actual machine that hosts your website (The common way would be to deploy a .war archive, when your web server is already running tomcat).

The geoserver's job is to render map tiles according to specifications provided by the WMS protocol. To include these tiles in your actual website and display them as a map, you will need a client application like OpenLayers, which handles the whole user interaction.

http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/installation/war.html

http://geoserver.org/display/GEOSDOC/OpenLayers

Answer 2

I agree with relet. An easy start it to click on the "preview" button in the Geoserver Web Interface (bottom left). There you can preview a layer with openlayers. Once you see your layer there, just look at the HTML + JS code of the page. You can start copy&pasting from there...