Creating WMS and WFS services with GeoServer

In the previous recipe, you created Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) from a PostGIS layer using MapServer. In this recipe, you will do that using another popular open-source web-mapping engine—GeoServer. You will then use the created services, as you did with MapServer, testing their exposed requests, first using a browser and then the QGIS desktop tool (you can do this with other software, as well, such as uDig, gvSIG, OpenJUMP GIS, and ArcGIS Desktop).

Getting ready

While MapServer is written in the C language and uses Apache as its web server, GeoServer is written in Java, and you therefore need to install the Java Virtual Machine (JVM ) in your system; it must be used from a servlet container such as Jetty and Tomcat. After installing the servlet container, you will be able to deploy the GeoServer application to it. For example, in Tomcat, you can deploy GeoServer by copying the GeoServer WAR (Web archive) file to Tomcat...