Introduction
There are several ways to write PostGIS programs, and in this chapter we will see a few of them. You will mainly use the Python language throughout this chapter. Python is a fantastic language with a plethora of GIS and scientific libraries that can be combined with PostGIS to write awesome geospatial applications.
If you are new to Python, you can quickly get productive with these excellent web resources:
- The official Python tutorial at http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/
- The popular Dive into Python book at http://www.diveintopython.net/
You can combine Python with some excellent and popular libraries, such as:
- Psycopg: This is the most complete and popular Python DB API implementation for PostgreSQL; see http://initd.org/psycopg/
- GDAL: Used to unchain the powerful GDAL library in your Python scripts; see http://www.gdal.org/gdal_tutorial.html
- requests: This is a handy Python standard library to manage HTTP stuff, such as opening URLs
- simplejson: This is a simple and fast JSON encoder...
