Leaftlet - A Lightweight JavaScript Library for Interactive Maps | Hacker News Reader

Leaftlet - A Lightweight JavaScript Library for Interactive Maps

leaflet.cloudmade.com

107 pointsmars21 comments

I used a similar mapping library, http://openlayers.org/ , around 4 years ago. It thought it was nice at the time. The documentation wasn't great, but there were decent examples and the support for GIS standards like WMS and WFS was solid. It looks like people have increasingly become dissatisfied with it and started working on alternatives like leaftlet.

http://vmx.cx/cgi-bin/blog/index.cgi/wherecampeu-2011:2011-0...

http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/472/perceived-flaws-ofope...

http://notes.tommacwright.com/post/6010879882/openlayers

If you're looking for a complete javascript mapping library, I'd stick with openlayers for now. In the future though, I hope leaflet takes off and offers some competition

Looks great. Has anyone compared this and the google maps api? I'm working on a GIS project and we're going to do some stuff in js for the web so I'm very curious.

I work full-time building custom Google Maps-based projects, so my first thought was to compare them. While this seems very nicely done, there's little in it that you couldn't do with the Google Maps API. Some of the default settings are more nicely chosen, though.

BTW, if you need a freelancer to help on your project, feel free to contact me.

Thanks! Unfortunately it's an academic thing so we're not hiring any outside help.

I too am doing research work using the google maps api (and their very good Google Distance API) and find there to be no real advantage in this one, or any feature that I don't see in the Google API, the maps api has been wonderful to work with.

One huge advantage is that unlike Google Maps it is Open Source.

I love that this uses OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps, as I like being able to control all my own data and not be reliant upon MegaCorp (TM) for my site to function. At the same time, I've never seen an OSM API that seemed both as useful and as simple as the Google Maps API, but this looks pretty nice.

I may have to wipe the dust off RateMyStudentRental.com and retrofit Leaflet at some point.

For some reason the map travels behind my cursor as I drag it around. This would drive me away if I was looking for an alternative mapping library to google maps.

Could you give more details on this problem? Do you mean that map moves more slowly than the cursor? In what browser/system does it happen?

Tried the demo really quickly (Mac OS X 10.6/Safari 5) but I got rendering errors without breaking a sweat:

http://www.shaggyfrog.com/junk/leaflet-rendering-errors.png

Based on it breaking so easily I wouldn't consider this an an alternative to Google Maps quite yet.

Well, it's in early stages of development, I'm sure it'll become quite stable in future - just give it some time.

Leaflet is just great. I made a demo as soon as I heard about it a few weeks ago. I combined leaflet on the client side with varnish as a tile cache and nginx as a tile server. I plan to switch to node.js as soon as it supports sendfile.

http://maps.cloudno.de

I've been using mapstraction (https://github.com/mapstraction/mxn) and like it; don't see much different here. Maybe someone should introduce them to each other.

Discussed (briefly) before at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548927

The title is misspelled on HN. (It's Leaflet.)

Unlike Polymaps this also supports IE6 & 7 which is a big win for orgs that have to support a wide range of browsers.

Aha! I came here about to ask "Why is this better than polymaps?" -- thank you! Any other reasons you know of? (or anyone else?)

It is also seriously targeted at mobile devices like iPhone and Android. It also has quite different approaches to API and source code architecture (with Leaflet leaning towards OOP and Polymaps towards functional approach).

Borks the whole page on the iPad. It appears to be stealing all touch events after any interaction.

Weird, didn't happen before. If you report the problem to https://github.com/CloudMade/Leaflet/issues I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.

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