Accessing GeoServer with the Google Maps JavaScript API

GeoServer is an open source map server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. It is one of the popular open source map servers that can publish OGC compliant services such as WMS and WFS. Web Map Service (WMS) is used for publishing georeferenced images and simple querying. On the other side, Web Feature Service (WFS) is used for publishing vector data to any kind of GIS clients. WFS is mostly used for data sharing purposes.

In this recipe, we will use one of GeoServer's standard published service named topp:states in WMS format. As stated in the Adding WMS layers to maps recipe of this chapter, WMS has different request types such as GetMap or GetCapabilities. We will also use a GetFeatureInfo addition to the GetMap request. This new request gets the information of the point on the map. Also, we used a tiled structure in this recipe to get WMS images in order to make a comparison between the untiled...