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Chapter 8, Building the Geospatial Web
#91 Build Interactive Web-Based Map Applications
HACK
developing effort that will allow you to provide custom styles and symbols
for map clients to display your layers with. The future is promising!
HACK
#91
Build Interactive Web-Based Map
Applications Hack #91
MapServer offers a powerful way to publish interactive maps on the World
Wide Web.
Bringing interactive maps to the Web may seem like a daunting task. I ini-
tially set out to display a map of my home area and plot additional points on
top. When I first went on this quest, I was afraid I would have to write kilo-
bytes of code by myself. Fortunately, there are packages out there that do
the hard parts, allowing us to focus on making maps.
MapServer, which lives at http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/, is a great package
for making interactive maps. It is a CGI program written in C that creates
interactive maps from your spatial data. (You can also use MapServer with
Perl, Python, and PHP using the provided MapScript modules). MapServer
Figure 8-8. RedSpider Add Layer interface