About the ShapeEditor

As we have seen, shapefiles are commonly used to store, make available, and transfer geospatial data. We have worked with shapefiles extensively in this book, obtaining freely available geospatial data in Shapefile format, writing programs to load data from a shapefile, and creating shapefiles programmatically.

While it is easy enough to edit the attributes associated with a shapefile's features, editing the features themselves is a lot more complicated. One approach is to install a GIS system and use it to import the data, make changes, and then export the data into another shapefile. While this works, it is hardly convenient if all you want to do is make a few changes to a shapefile's features. It would be much easier if we had a web application specifically designed for editing shapefiles.

This is precisely what we are going to implement: a web-based shapefile editor. Rather unimaginatively, we'll call this program ShapeEditor.

The following flowchart depicts the ShapeEditor...