GeoServer Beginner's Guide: Share and edit geospatial data with this open source software server

GeoServer is a Java application. So, we need to ensure that you have it installed and properly working on your machine, but you don't need to know how to write Java™ to install or to get started using GeoServer.

There are two main packages of Java. Depending on what you are planning to do with Java, you may want to install a JDK (Java Development Kit) or JRE (Java Runtime Environment). The former enables you to compile Java™ code, while the latter has all you need to run most Java applications.

Starting from release 2.0, GeoServer does not need a full JDK installation and you can go safely with JRE. It works well with Java 6 but as Java 7 is not deeply tested by developers, it should work but you may experience minor issues. Unless you have some strong reasons to use Java 7, you should use JRE 6.

In the 90s, Java development was started by Sun Microsystems. Sun has developed each new release until it merged into Oracle Corporation. While Oracle did not change the Java license...

We will verify the presence of a JRE/JDK installation on Windows, using the following steps:

We will check JRE/JDK installation from the command line.

We will install Oracle JRE 1.6. We are assuming that you didn't find any previous Java installation.

We will install Oracle JRE 1.6. As mentioned previously, there is no Ubuntu package for Java 6; we are going to perform a manual installation.

Having correctly installed the JRE you can now pass on and install the servlet container. Servlet container, or web container, is the component server that interacts with the servlets. It is responsible for managing the lifecycle of servlets, mapping a URL to a particular servlet, and ensuring access security. It should implement Java servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

As for JRE, you have a few choices here; a brief list is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_container.

Apache Tomcat, GlassFish , and JBoss are most popular and are all available in an open source edition. You may wonder which one is the best choice for running GeoServer. In a production environment, usually the same container is shared among several web applications. You are not going to choose the container; the architects and system administrators made their choices and you have to conform to them. As a beginner, you have the opportunity of selecting it! Apache Tomcat should be your first...

We will install the Apache Tomcat 7.x release.

On Windows, we will use the installer. It will add an item in the service control panel allowing you to set Tomcat for automatic startup.

We will install Apache Tomcat 7.x release.

On Ubuntu, you have two alternatives for installing Apache Tomcat. You can use the package manager to get it. At the time of writing, Ubuntu repositories contain the 7.0.26 release of Apache Tomcat for Ubuntu 12.04. I prefer, and we will be following this method in the book, to download the archive and perform a manual installation. You will have full control over the installation and you can choose the appropriate release number. On the other hand, you can't rely on automatic updates for Tomcat.

On Windows we configured Tomcat as a system service, that is, a program running at boot without any user action. Are you wondering why on Ubuntu you have to manually start Tomcat? You don't. Indeed, the operating system can be configured for automatic start of services. In this section, you will create a script and learn how it works.

We are well on our way! Go to the GeoServer site (http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Stable) and review the installation options available. You'll find several versions of GeoServer. We're going to be using the Web Archive version.

We will deploy the web archive on Apache Tomcat. As you may have guessed, using a Java application server is pretty much the same on any operating system. The next section is common to Linux and Windows and then we will have a little difference in the book, depending on the operating system you are using.

With Java installed and working, let's install the GeoServer. The latest version is 2.2.

The web interface shown at http://localhost:8080/geoserver requires you to log in. You can use the default values of admin as username and geoserver as password. The new interface will show you some warning about security issues:

You may ignore the third and fifth warning; we will cover them in detail in Chapter 10, Securing Your GeoServer Before Production. It is a good idea to address the others immediately.

We've laid out a basic foundation to get GeoServer up and running.

In this chapter, you learned how to check whether the Java Runtime Environment (JRE 1.6) is installed and properly working. You also installed Tomcat on Windows and Linux, and configured it to start automatically.

After filling the system requirements, you explored the web archive option to install GeoServer and accessed the administrative interface using a web browser.

The web interface is a very powerful tool and you have to know it well to use all GeoServer's features. In the next chapter, we will explore all the sections, looking in detail at what you can do to configure it, how to add data, and preview maps.