Summary
In this chapter, we have implemented, tested, and made improvements to a simple web-based application which displays shorelines, towns, and lakes (DISTAL) within a given radius of a starting point. This application was the impetus for exploring a number of important concepts within geospatial application development, including the following:
- The creation of a simple but complete web-based geospatial application
- Using databases to store and work with large amounts of geospatial data
- Using a "black-box" map rendering module to create maps using spatial data selected from a database
- Examining the issues involved in identifying features based on their true distance rather than using a lat/long approximation
- Learning how to use spatial joins effectively
- Exploring usability issues in a prototype implementation
- Dealing with issues of data quality
- Learning how to precalculate data to improve performance
As a result of our development efforts, we have learned the following:
- Setting up a...
