Polymaps - A JavaScript Library for Image and Vector-tiled Maps | Hacker News Reader

Polymaps - A JavaScript Library for Image and Vector-tiled Maps

polymaps.org

72 pointsmgunes25 comments

Nice thread guys. In terms of a couple of other alternative mapping libraries, I can point towards a couple in addition to Polymaps. By alternative I guess I mean something that is not currently ready for mainstream consumption - unapologetic disregard for no IE6 (nor IE7 or IE8 in reality) support or attempting to support browsers that aren't adopting forward thinking standards such as SVG / HTML5. I will preface this by saying I am actually pulling one of these together so I might be a little biased in how cool I think tech like this is (Polymaps included).

First off you have a library called Cartagen (http://cartagen.org/) which is a very ambitious project indeed and does move towards what simon below suggested in terms of actually rendering without the need for image tiles. Well worth a look.

Next, you have the project I have been working on (opensource, MIT licensed, etc) which I have called Tile5 (http://tile5.org/). In terms of GIS feature completeness, it really doesn't compare with the Polymaps or more mature technologies such as OpenLayers - yet. My focus has been to date to create a really nice feeling library for web mapping (mobile touch support, inertial scrolling, easing animations, etc) as my goal was to compete with native maps on mobile - ambitious, I know.

I'd certainly welcome feedback and input regarding Tile5, but would also recommend checking out Cartagen as well to see what else is possible using the likes of Canvas and SVG.

Happy to talk more about this, but obviously don't want to spam the thread.

The word "maps" on the start page is actually a map. :)

You can zoom and drag the map around, in the letters.

How does this compare to OpenLayers? Does it follow the OGC specs such as WMS, WFS, etc?

Edit: okay, it does vector tiling. That's very nice. OpenLayers' vector support scales badly so this might help.

I have another question on that regard. How do you "put it all together"? Specially if you want to host your maps locally. Mapserver, Openlayers, OSM data, QGIS, ... I don't know where to start.

Any good references? (I tried google. I will myself check out http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/MappingYourData , but the more the better.)

Here is a nice tutorial on how set up a server to render tiles with Mapnik:

http://weait.com/content/build-your-own-openstreetmap-server

If you want to serve tiles you would then have to take a look at mod_tile: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mod_tile

Great. Thank you for the pointers.

http://simplegeo.com/ is trying to fill this niche. They provide a simple API for storing and querying geospatial data.

GeoServer + PostGIS is the typical setup, in my experience it's "light" enough.

Mate, I think polymaps would struggle a little with the OGC stuff. I haven't had experience with the OGC standards in depth, but I have worked with deCarta who implement OpenLS for their webservices and knowing what was involved there it's probably a little beyond the scope of what the guys are trying to achieve in the polymaps project.

From what I can tell, Polymaps is definitely optimized for retrieving map tiles that conform to some kind of algorithmically determinable tile url (such as OSM, Google, Bing, etc).

WMS tiles are designated by such an URL. Implementing a WMS subset sufficient for something like this is close to trivial.

Good to know - thanks :)

I especially like the tiled approach to data streaming that Polymaps implements, though I wonder if it's inefficient if you have really large polygons and a small grid (I'm assuming that if a polygon intersects the grid it'll be streamed rather than being chopped up).

Get ready for all these client side 2D mapping libraries to get a big speed bump with the onset of HW-accelerated Canvas/SVG rendering.

The online mapping world currently dependent on tiling to get literally anything done. It would be nice to see some variety.

Maybe the ability to handle more data faster will spur innovation in lightweight GIS data messaging formats.

> Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers.

Is the browser support documented somewhere? I can't find it.

Native SVG support would be required, so the likes of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and IE9 would all work. On mobile any webkit based browser should also work quite nicely.

Testing on my iPod Touch in Safari, it does not seem to work.

From http://github.com/simplegeo/polymaps

"Browser Support:

Tested in recent Webkit browsers (Safari 4+, Chrome 6, Webkit nightlies) Tested in recent Firefox browsers (3.6+) Optimistic about Opera, IE9, but not part of core testing yet. SVG is required, even for image display... in other words: if you can't require SVG, don't use Polymaps!"

Nice project! We put something similar together earlier this year using GSV and Raphael, but this is pretty sweet (too bad it wasn't around 9 months ago :)

Although it does feel like SVG/images are still not quite as snappy to drag when compared to just regular images in the browser DOM (which is why we did a hybrid).

I'm surprised ESRI doesn't show up more often. Their tools are de factor standards in many many markets.

OT but the phrase you're looking for is the latin de facto .

ha! typo. Thanks for the correction. That's what I get for typing without coffee.

Their tools are also a gigantic pain in the ass. (Note: things are improving, thanks to the power of competition!)

I've thought very strongly about having a standard policy of upping my bill rate 50% if I'm doing ArcObjects code. :)

Your correct, ESRI tools are a de facto standard for map creation. However when your doing dynamic map creation or real time situational awareness the ESRI tools perform poorly. There are better commercial products on the market and free oss tools available such as OpenSceneGraph with the OSGEarth plugin.

Really good! Somebody knows if there's a more simple implementation to exhibit something like a building project? (limited space with a great zoom possibility).

The maps implementations don't seams to fit for this purpose.

Excellent remark. The demos are things that typically work just fine with tiled (e.g. WMS) raster images rather than vector data. It would be more interesting to see the vector aspect come to life.

I've been doing quite a bit of work with SVG maps in Raphael and I have to say that relative to that, building maps is dead simple with this (and renders amazingly quickly).

However, I'm having a pretty tough time getting this stuff to interact dynamically. Do you have any examples where you're interacting with the maps with javascript (i.e. changing colors, etc.)

All in all, awesome work, though.

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