Spatial data on the web
In order to understand how spatial data on the web works, we first need to get a picture about the architecture of the web. The web resides on the Internet, where we have to deal with two kinds of software--servers and clients:
- Server: An application that listens to a port with a background process (daemon), and accepts requests from that port. It processes valid requests and serves data according to them.
- Client: An application responsible for sending valid requests to server side application(s) (for example, web browser-web server, SSH client-SSH server, QGIS-PostgreSQL). It also needs to be able to interpret the response sent back from the server.
Note
If you are familiar with the client-server architecture, you can skip the following subsection.
Understanding the basics of the web
The Internet is designed to be an infinitely expandable network of computers. Therefore, servers and clients are only the end points of this network--there are additional nodes doing other...
