QGIS offers a very easy and convenient way to publish QGIS projects with its own spatial server. It is the CGI application QGIS Server, which we have already configured in Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Environment.
If you are using Windows, and could not configure QGIS Server properly, don't worry, just skip to the GeoServer part (Using GeoServer).
Similar to the popular UMN MapServer, QGIS Server is a simple CGI application which does not track the published data. While MapServer needs a configuration file where paths to the data sources are defined along with other configuration parameters, QGIS Server needs a QGIS project file, which contains the paths along with other information, like styling. We can provide the project file's absolute path in a map parameter.
While web servers can only access a portion of the file system, CGI scripts can...
