Scripting GeoServer

Now it is time to make GeoServer do something for us through the magic of Python scripts. First, we will see how simple it can be to extend the spatial-analysis capabilities of GeoServer by scripting a WPS process. Then we will follow this up by seeing how simple it is to extend GeoServer's capabilities by creating a new RESTful service to get feature information.

Creating a WPS process

While GeoServer comes with an extensive list of built-in WPS processes, over time it is likely that we will demand more from it. The WPS extension will allow us to add more processes, but to do so will require us to write some Java code to create some JAR files that we will then need to deploy. Once deployed, we will then need to restart our GeoServer instance to ensure that the new process is picked up and loaded. If we do not know how to write Java, then this will be a difficult task to accomplish. However, if we have the scripting extension installed, then we can create a WPS process...