Overview

Tonight, I’ll only have time to go over some mapping options I’ve been looking into.

Mapping Library/API’s

I think this stackshare comparision summarizes the confusion of mapping well. It compares three options, but those options are not apples to apples:

• leaflet(js)
• mapbox
• openlayers

Leaflet is really just a javascript library for interacting with maps. But it doesn’t ship with the actual map. That’s the responsibility of mapbox and open layers.

To be even more clear, Mapbox, and its (primary?) competitor, Google Maps, does everything: it is a library, and it also serves map data. On the other hand, Openlayers just serves the map data.

Now, what do we even mean by map data? The technical term is tiles.

React Libraries

There are React wrappers around many of the major options:

• react deckgl (from the folks at Uber)
• react leaflet
• react openlayers

Open Source Tile Providers

This is my favorite part of mapping, and I look forward to making a tool for switching between multiple tile providers to compare how different maps can look.

• openlayers
• openstreetmap

Reference

• leafletjs examples
• mapbox pricing (there is a free tier on the order of tens of thousands of requests)