RFC Mapping Libraries

[lm93547]

Mapping Libraries

There a few good options. The standards include: LeafletJS, the OG. DeckGL, the cool new upstart on the block & Mapbox, the corporate monolith 🐍 . There are also a few other cool standouts we could explore, such as DataMaps for simpler SVG Maps.

What We Need

• A "slippy" map that is lightweight & easy to use.
• Good community support
• Open source / free (Or generous free tiers)
• Look good
• Perform well with large datasets

What We Will Show/Features

• As we are planning to use the iNaturalist (correct?) data sets, these literally have extents of the entire planet (As birds can go anywhere right 🐦 ), and potentially millions of data points depending on how frequent a bird species is
• Heatmaps like ones found here
• Search or filter functionality (Maybe very involved but would be fun & cool)
• Maybe some forms of geospatial calculations, like the number of bird types in your area

LeafletJS

Pros

• Easy to use
• Lots (and I mean lots) of plugins
• Lightweight
• Free & Open Source

  Cons

• Generic looking
• Can be lots of code to implement simple features due to the inherent simplicity of the library

DeckGL

Pros

• Powerful very powerful
• Efficient at handling large datasets
• Built in events (Hover etc)
• Can create beautiful gradients & layers for the data you are showing
• Easy to handle varying data types (GeoJSON, KML etc)
• Multiple language & framework support
• Free & Open Source

  Cons

• Overkill for most projects
• Steep learning curve
• Made by Uber 👎🏾
• Recommended docs use Mapbox basemaps which can cost money

Mapbox

Pros

• Lots of features
• Easy to develop with
• Very comprehensive docs
• Easy to style & create some interesting basemaps

  Cons

• Closed source & can cost
• Just a rip off of our boi Leaflet

DataMaps

Pros

• SVG so blazing fast
• Easy to use & setup
• Built in events (Hover etc)

  Cons

• Not as well documented or maintained as the other libraries
• Never used it

@hirako2000 let me know what you think, if you have any other ideas!!

[hirako2000]

thanks so much for the info dump. And good stuff!

• I think we can contribute to deck.gl if needed to make it happen.
• I'm tempted to insist that we use open solutions. licensing with maps is cumbersome at best, a blocker at times.
• Also, offline support is a major part of open and free solutions.

afaik OpenStreetMaps (OSM) offers offline and is well open/free in free beer and spirit. Part of the RFC imo should validate deck.gl decency with OSM for at least what we know would need, highlight imitations, and some idea of what it could take to fork deck.gl integrating capabilities and just improve them for first class OSM support, again for what we want to do.