StationA / tilenol

Scalable, multi-backend geo vector tile server
MIT License
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[RFC] Add support for lightweight post-processing of feature data #43

Open jerluc opened 3 years ago

jerluc commented 3 years ago

I'd like to propose that we provide a mechanism for allowing some amount of post-processing of feature data to support some common tasks, e.g.:

The reason to consider this a post-processing step is so that a singular representation of this logic can apply to feature data coming from multiple backend sources, especially for the scenario of computing some tile-wide aggregations.

One thought would be to introduce support for some basic, embeddable scripting language (e.g. Lua, JS, etc.) that can be provided either statically in the tilenol configuration, or potentially in the request URL itself (e.g. script=<BLAH>). By using a simple scripting language (especially a familiar one), users would be able to quickly pick up the scripting capabilities. Furthermore, by providing the option to support request-time scripting, this could be used for very powerful, expressive, and interactive geospatial analyses over mixed datasets.