A new major version of OpenLayers is out:
The 8.0 release brings several API simplifications. Some of them are not backwards compatible, so make sure to read the upgrade notes. The new StadiaMaps source replaces the Stamen source, because Stamen no longer hosts map tiles. Several WebGL improvements are also part of this release. And finally, a new loader API for image layers makes working with non-tiled raster data more modular and faster.
My colleagues at Development Seed have released eoAPI:
Say hello 👋 to eoAPI, a cloud-native backend for standing up a modern, open geospatial data infrastructure. Built around the STAC specification, eoAPI makes massive earth observation (EO) data archives discoverable and interoperable. EO data is accessible through open community standards for data discovery, allowing your data to connect seamlessly to scientific notebooks, AI pipelines, and dashboard interfaces.
eoAPI bundles open-source software into a package, which simplifies standing up modern geospatial data infrastructure to aid discovery and visualisation of geospatial vector and raster data and make it available through open standards:
- pg-STAC is an optimized Postgres schema to index and search large-scale STAC collections.
- stac-fastapi is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Features API compliant FastAPI application for STAC metadata search.
- titiler-pgSTAC is a TiTiler extension that connects to pgSTAC to support large-scale dynamic mosaic tiling for visualizing STAC collections and items.
- tipg is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Features and Tiles API for vector datasets.
Getting started is easy with infrastructure-as-code templates allowing you to deploy eoAPI with opinionated but reasonable defaults:
- eoapi-cdk - A set of AWS CDK constructs to deploy eoAPI services.
- eoapi-template - An AWS CDK app that shows how to configure the eoapi-cdk constructs.
- eoapi-k8s - IaC and Helm charts for deploying eoAPI services on AWS and GCP.
The softwares is available open-source and free under the permissive MIT licence.
Mapbox GL marked a paradigm shift in web mapping; away from pre-rendered tiled raster maps towards more dynamic vector maps rendered in the client.
Konstantin Käfer looks back at the early days of Mapbox GL:
Luckily, the time was right for a new approach. Several things fell into place that enabled the creation of Mapbox GL:
- We had just developed the Mapbox Vector Tile format, enabling efficient delivery of small chunks of geodata to the client. Over the past decade, this format has become tremendously successful and is now an industry standard that is used across the entire geospatial community.
- WebGL was becoming widely available, having been standardized just two years earlier.
Mapbox GL was a game-changer. Too bad they decided to switch to a proprietary license.
This has been lurking in my feed reader for a while, but it’s still worth sharing: Google offers a new set of Web Components to compose and add basic maps applications to websites, removing the need to write extensive JavaScript.
The basic example shows how to add a map with a marker to a website:
<gmp-map
style="height: 500px;"
center="41.081736,29.009206"
zoom="10"
map-id="DEMO_MAP_ID"
>
<gmp-advanced-marker
position="41.081736,29.009206"
title="Istanbul"
></gmp-advanced-marker>
</gmp-map>
More interactive maps can be built with auxiliary components for buttons, layout and overlays.
This is a positive development: Web Components allow developers to add basic map functionality to websites without resorting to additional frameworks with potentially heavy footprints. I’d like to see more proposals like this.
Open-source alternatives are available (for OpenLayers) or have not seen significant development in recent years (for Leaflet).
For a recent investigation comparing internet speeds across the US, The Markup needed a map without compromising their pledge to user privacy:
Initially we turned to Mapbox, an established leader for generating and publishing online maps. But when we embedded a map from Mapbox on our staging website, we found it assigned a tracker that could not be disabled without violating Mapbox’s terms of service.
They ultimately settled for MapTiler in combination with MapLibre. Go open source!
A new major release is available of the open-source WebGL mapping framework MapLibre GL.
This release is a big step for MapLibre GL JS! With more than 500 commits, and almost a year in the making, version 3.0.0 is surely our best release yet.
Notable changes include:
transformCameraUpdate provides a hook that allows you to manipulate the map’s camera state, ideal for use with reactive front-end frameworks where the camera-state properties are stored externally,interpolate-hcl,VersaTiles is a set of open-source applications that form a complete stack to create, host, and visualise OpenStreetMap data on the Web using vector tiles.
From the VersaTiles website:
VersaTiles lets you use OpenStreetMap based vector tiles, without any restrictions, locked-in paid services or attribution requirements beyond OpenStreetMap. You can use the freely downloadable tilesets from VersaTiles on your own infrastrure, in any way you like. Our open spec, royalty free and permissively licensed conatainer format works with virtually any webserver or CDN — with no requirement to pay unreasonable prices for “Tiles-as-a-Service”.
It includes a tile generator, based on TileMaker that produces tiles in the Shortbread schema. A converter produces tiles in the custom *.versatiles format from MBTiles. The VersaTiles format results on a smaller footprint—compared to MBTiles—and it doesn’t use SQLite under the hood. That means you can host it pretty much anywhere, either using the VersaTiles server or on a CDN; and clients can utilise HTTP range requests to access a subset of the data. The front-end is based on MapLibre, and includes map styles and a range of open-source fonts.
Deck.gl v8.9 introduces interesting new features:
Deck.gl doesn’t get much recognition, but it looks like a serious web-mapping toolkit.
The market for open-source web-map libraries is getting crowded again. Some classic libraries are still around: OpenLayers, Leaflet, and MapboxGL (technically not open-source). With MapLibre, Gleo, and Deck.gl, some promising new implementations are on the rise. Technology-wise, map front-ends have stalled in the last couple of years. I hope this newfound competition results in advancements in the field.
Planet has published a library of React components to build map user interfaces using OpenLayers:
The @planet/maps library provides components for rendering maps in your React applications. The library acts as a wrapper around OpenLayers, transforming the imperative API into declarative components.
The design goals:
The purpose of this project is to provide a mapping between React’s declarative components and OpenLayers’ imperative API. In other words, this project provides a React renderer for OpenLayers.
[…]
- Components exported by this package map 1:1 with classes exported by OpenLayers.
- Component props map directly to properties that are settable on instances of OpenLayers classes. Exceptions to this are props like options (passed to the constructor only), listener props (e.g. onChange), and ref.
- Components accept a ref that provide access to the underlying OpenLayers instance.
The examples only show a small fraction of the whole feature set of the library. I looked through the source code on GitHub, and it seems like many—if not all—OpenLayers classes have a corresponding React component in the library.
Fiona, the Python library for reading and writing features from and to various data sources, has a new release. From the release notes:
The major new features are:
- A new CRS class identical to Rasterio’s.
- New Feature and Geometry classes. These are returned instead of dicts but are compatible with version 1.8’s dicts. _ Access to format driver metadata.
Wheels of the new release are also available for M1 Macs now.
James Milner released an alpha version of Terra Draw, a JavaScript library that implements adapters centralising drawing functions across different map libraries. Instead of building functionality to draw rectangles, lines, or points for each mapping API, you can now learn Terra Draw and be done with it.
Leaflet, MapboxGL and Google Maps are supported; of the major contemporary libraries, only OpenLayers and MapLibre are currently missing. Terra Draw supports creating and editing points, lines, polygons, and circles and even includes a freehand tool.
Most products are set on one mapping library, and Terra Draw will be less valuable. But there are a couple of scenarios where Terra Draw is useful. Terra Draw could be an option if you’re building a new product and haven’t decided (or don’t want to commit) to one mapping library or base map provider. It allows you to focus on the problem, not the technology. In consulting, when different projects often require a different provider, Terra Draw allows transferring solutions across various projects, potentially freeing up time to work on other things. And TerraDraw enables you to adhere to engineering best practices: The drawing implementation is abstracted away so you can switch libraries later; for example, when a vendor decides to change to a more restrictive proprietary license.
Iván Sánchez Ortega introduces Gleo, a WebGL mapping library he’s been working on for a couple of months now:
What’s Gleo? In a nutshell, it’s a Javascript, WebGL-first, web mapping display library. It’s kinda reinventing the wheel of Leaflet/Openlayers/MapLibre, if such reinvention involved a lot of OOP architectural thinking.
Why you ask, if we already have OpenLayers and MapLibre doing pretty much the same thing:
The point is being able to understand the architecture of a WebGL map library. Because, as I said several times during the conference [FOSS4G], I still don’t understand what a “bucket” is in Maplibre parlance.
Building something for the sake of understanding the fundamentals of some technology is a perfectly fine reason to reinvent the wheel.
You can view the code on GitLab or follow Iván on Mastodon or Twitter, where he posts regular updates about his work on Gleo.
There’s some real momentum right now surrounding MapLibre. AWS started sponsoring the project in August; there’s talk about joining the MapLibre and Maputnik communities, and now Stamen is getting involved to work on MapLibre’s native SDK.
Stephanie May, Damon Burgett, Stamen:
We are happy to share that we have begun work on improving MapLibre Native with technical leadership by Wet Dog Weather and funding from AWS.
The announcement from the MapLibre organisation provides further detail:
A design proposal for the modularization of the map rendering architecture can be found at #547. This modularization will allow new rendering architectures to be implemented quickly and more easily, and we anticipate that the modularization will give us a concrete framework to better interrogate various migration strategies.
I love this approach, gathering feedback from the community before starting the work to make actual changes to the code and architecture.
Polylines are an efficient way to represent line geometries. You provide a geometry, and out comes a scrambled string of letters and numbers that encodes the geometry in just a few characters. Polylines are helpful when you want to efficiently transfer geometry information between services. The Mapbox Static Images API, for example, can overlay complex geometries from Polylines, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise because the request-URL length is limited.
Placemark has released a new Polyline JavaScript library, allowing developers to encode or decode coordinate arrays and GeoJSON objects. It does pretty much the same as existing Polyline utilities from Mapbox or Google. Still, Placemark’s solution is a modernised implementation that includes TypeScript types and a neat autogenerated documentation site; it supports ESM and UMD imports and standardises longitude-latitude order.
Leaflet was one of these libraries that I thought were done. While there have been constant updates and new releases throughout the years, there were rarely any massive, ground-breaking additions. Leaflet is built perfectly against its small, well-defined scope. Huge changes just weren’t necessary.
Even great software is never done because it needs to keep up with the latest technological developments. And so development of a new major release for Leaflet was announced as part of the 1.9 release notes. The work for the next major version catches up with recent developments in the browser market, the JavaScript landscape and compiler tooling:
- Dropping support for Internet Explorer.
This has been a long time coming, but now that Internet Explorer is officially end-of-life, it’s time to say goodbye. Going forward, Leaflet will move to an evergreen strategy that targets browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari.- Embracing modern JavaScript.
To maintain backwards compatibility, Leaflet is written entirely in ES5, a version of JavaScript supported by legacy browsers. So we have not been able to make use of many great JavaScript features (e.g. standardized classes, instead having to rely on our own implementation). By adopting a more modern version of the ECMAScript standard, we can start working towards aligning Leaflet with what is expected from a modern JavaScript library.- Standardized modules.
When we released Leaflet v1, the landscape in the JavaScript world was very different and full of competing module standards such as CommonJS, AMD and UMD. Today, ECMAScript modules have become the clear way forward to unite the JavaScript ecosystem under one banner. Moving forward, Leaflet will only be distributed in a single standardized module system, greatly reducing complexity of our distributed code.- Removing the Leaflet global.
As a developer using Leaflet, the capital letter L is probably intimately familiar to you. This is the Leaflet global where all of Leaflet’s functionality lives. To allow compiler tooling to better eliminate dead-code through a process called tree-shaking, we are removing this global variable. To preserve backwards compatibility with older plugins, we will provide a shim that can be imported manually that will restore this functionality.
There’s no release date, not even an estimate, and maintenance of the 1.x branch will continue in the meantime.