Is it possible to write a server to handle OpenLayers.Protocol.HTTP({url: “/cgi-bin/fs/workspace/” …}) which was done by FeatureServer

Question

I am a newbie to geoserver and openlayers. Recently, I am stuck in saving changes(drawing polygons and points) of the feature vectors to a local(geoserver/www/...) .json file.

The tutorial I followed is here. But it said:

"Of course you also need a program on your server that knows what to do with the transactions sent by the protocol/strategy. The server side has nothing to do with OL, but you can't demonstrate functionality without it, so I'll use a workspace I play around with (which uses FeatureServer, which sadly has not been much supported in recent years). This is only for small-scale test purposes, and any features entered in it may disappear at any time."

Besides, http://featureserver.org/ cannot be visited. So I wonder if it is possible to write a server program myself and replace the url with "http://localhost:XXXX/MyWebServer/index.jsp" under the OpenLayers.Protocol.HTTP. Then the index.jsp file will handle the GET/PUT request and response to send or save the json file.

Since I am a beginner, correct me if anything I mentioned is wrong. That would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

To save features edited with OpenLayers you need a server side component that speaks WFS-T like TinyOWS. You could of course write one yourself, but I guess that will take longer.

TinyOWS is actively maintained and one of the examples shows how to integrate it with OpenLayers.