Most popular mapping presentations today, ranging from clients to servers, show and discuss only maps in web mercator, the popular Mercator derived projection used by OSM as well as most commercial tiles providers.

There is however an interesting, exciting world of map projections out there, that are still being used in a variety of context. This presentation will introduce the advancement made in GeoTools and GeoServer to handle those use cases, where users have a worldwide data set, and need to view all or part of it in multiple projections, some of which valid in a limited area, and requiring the software to perform a proper display of it on the fly, without any preparation.

We’ll discuss GeoTools/GeoServer “advanced projection handling” manages to deal with these cases, wrapping data, dealing with the poles and the dateline, cutting on the fly excess data, densifying on the fly long lines as needed to ensure a smooth reprojection, for a variety of cases, ranging from seemingly innocuous datum shifts, maps having the prime meridian over the pacific, and the various tricks to properly handle stereographic, transverse mercator, Lambert conic and other limited area projections against world wide source data sets.