Chapter 12. Using PostGIS in a desktop environment
In this chapter, we’ll cover some of the popular open source GIS desktop viewing tools that work with PostGIS. As with proprietary software, you’ll find that each has its own strengths and weaknesses and caters to a certain niche of users or tasks. In this chapter we’ll start off by providing a brief at-a-glance summary of these tools, liberally ladling out our personal opinions. We hope that once you’ve completed this chapter you’ll have a better understanding of which tools are best for what you’re doing and for your particular style of working. We’ll focus mostly on the use of these tools to view and query data but will also highlight the features that each has to build custom desktop applications to extend the native feature set via plug-ins and scripting.