Henderson Colin. - Mastering GeoServer

Colin Henderson is a spatial solutions architect with 14 years of experience working on solutions to complex spatial problems. He is currently the Geospatial Systems Capability Lead for Atkins, one of the world's leading design, engineering, and project management consultancies. Although experienced in a wide range of proprietary GIS software, his current focus is on specializing in the integration of open source software in complex enterprise environments. His most recent projects involve the integration of GeoServer with FME Server from Safe Software and the delivery of spatial web-mapping applications through Esri's ArcGIS for the Server platform and Latitude Geographics' Geocortex framework. Colin is the Technical Architect and Lead Developer of Atkins' open source-based spatial integration platform, CIRRUSmaps, a solution built on the best breed of open source spatial software, including PostGIS and OpenLayers, with GeoServer at its heart, and designed from the ground-up for deployment in cloud environments.

A self-confessed techie, Colin enjoys digging deeper to understand technology and software, and then applying this learning to create innovative solutions to problems. When possible, he likes to "pay it forward" by helping others with their problems, through contributions on GIS Stack Exchange, in particular.

I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandfather, John Denis Stevens, who sadly passed away while I was writing and never got to see the finished product. He often liked to say "these computer things will never catch on!"

I would like to thank my parents for buying me my first computer, I really enjoyed breaking it and then trying to get it working again. Without the introduction, my curiosity of all things computers would never have happened.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Amy, and children, Evie and Max, for their patience during the writing process; I love you all very much.

Luca De Felice is a keen and passionate GIS software engineer. His educational background and working experience are in environmental sciences, with particular emphasis in the field of GIS techniques applied to risk and hazard management and monitoring. During his university studies, he started developing models for the evaluation of flood hazards. This activity continued after his graduation, with his design of GIS to build hydrologic models being applied to sample basins within a European project. For several years, he worked for a public office to contribute to the development of a hydro-geological GIS-based early warning system at the regional/national level. In this context, he learned GIS, IT environment development, database, and web mapping, applied to any kind of environmental data. Moreover, he contributed to several articles and workshops intended to disseminate novel approaches towards the development of GIS-based early warning systems.

He has been working for more than 10 years as a GIS scientific consultant in different technical contexts, where he applies his deep knowledge of GIS and IT computation in practical cases concerning the design and development of GIS-based environmental monitoring systems.

Stefano Iacovella is a longtime GIS developer and consultant living in Rome, Italy. He also routinely works as a GIS course instructor. He has a PhD in Geology. Being very curious, he developed a deep knowledge of IT technologies, mainly focusing on GIS software and related standards. Starting his career as an ESRI employee, he was exposed to, and became confident with proprietary GIS software, mainly the ESRI suite of products.

Over the last 14 years, he became more and more involved with open source software, also integrating it with proprietary software. He loves the open source approach, and really trusts in collaboration and sharing of knowledge. He strongly believes in the open source idea and constantly manages to spread it out, not only in the GIS sector. He has been using GeoServer since release 1.5, configuring, deploying, and hacking it in several projects. Other GFOSS projects he uses and likes are GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, QGIS, and OpenLayers.

He authored two books on GeoServer with Packt Publishing, GeoServer Cookbook , a practical set of recipes to get the most out of the software, and GeoServer Beginner's Guide , a first approach to GeoServer features.

When not playing with maps and geometric shapes, he loves reading about Science, mainly Physics and Maths, riding his bike, and having fun with his wife and his two daughters, Alice and Luisa.

You can contact him at <> or follow him on his Twitter handle @iacovellas.

Roy A. Justo is a geospatial application developer. He was born and raised in Havana, Cuba, and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography with Honors from the University of Havana. He also earned a Master's degree in Geographic Information Technologies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Roy has worked in this field as a teacher and researcher. He also worked in the private sector, creating geospatial solutions for diverse markets. His work has taken him to Munich, Barcelona, Boston, and most recently, New York City. He is currently working at one of the world's largest privately held software firms, where he integrates geospatial functionalities into BI development environments.