Support for RFC 6902 style GeoJSON patches

[sgillies]

How to diff GeoJSON has come up in various places and just now again in an email from @gundersen. It seems like this project could be the place to discover good ways to diff and patch GeoJSON.

Here's a standards track RFC for JSON PATCH that I've scanned:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902

and an Node implementation that I haven't yet tried:

https://npmjs.org/package/json-patch

JSON PATCH is quite verbose, but then so is GeoJSON. JSON PATCH covers the basic changes to elements of an array, but it could be that these won't scale to the big numerical arrays of GeoJSON. We might need to extend or change what's recommended in http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902#appendix-A.2.

cc @benbalter @tmcw

[tmcw]

Cool, will think about this. Big consideration for anything geojson.io-related is that it has no server or backend component, so it cannot provide its own REST APIs and so on.

[tmcw]

This is a great feature for something server-side with its own data store - that doesn't describe geojson.io currently and I don't think it should be on the roadmap.

[springmeyer]

dropping a few links here that might be useful for where/when this gets picked up in a serverside project:

• https://github.com/mikolalysenko/patcher.js
• https://github.com/benbalter/geojson-diff