Time for action – retrieving vector data

We will use WFS to get vector data encoded in GML. In case you disabled it, as we did in Chapter 11, Tuning GeoServer in a Production Environment, you will need to enable the WFS in GeoServer. Open your command-line console; we are going to use curl for sending requests:

1. The first operation that we will use is GetCapabilities. It describes which feature types and operations are available on the server:

   ~$ curl -XGET "http://localhost/geoserver/wfs?service=wfs&version=1.0.0&request=GetCapabilities" -o getCapabilities.xml

2. The XML returned is quite huge; the following lines show you the brief description for a featuretype element:

   <FeatureType>
       <Name>NaturalEarth:10m_railroads</Name>
         <Title>10m_railroads</Title>
         <Abstract/>
         <Keywords>10m_railroads, features</Keywords>
         <SRS>EPSG:4326</SRS>
         <LatLongBoundingBox minx="-150.08159339101002" miny="8.329046942181577...