Hacker News Reader

Comment by philips | Hacker News Reader

I am a novice at GIS and mapping but when I got started I thought a map/tile server was the only way to build mapping webapps.

But, in my admittedly simple application PMTiles can cover a lot of my visualization use cases with a thin Django app doing GEOJson for interactive layers.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

View on HN

I'm working on a map project [1] (which is a proof of concept) where you can add posts and stories by sharing the map URL on social media (mastodon.social only at the moment, we used to have a twitter listener as well). The state of the map is encoded in the URL and is added as a post when the listener catches the URL in the stream.

So far you can draw shapes and unofficially add geojsons to the map. I am very excited adding the ability to link custom PMTiles in the future!

[1] https://libmap.org

You can use pmtiles through mapserver via GDAL!

Wow, thanks! I checked and PMTiles is even supported in Maplibre. [1] This can probably replace 30% of online maps with static sources.

[1]: https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/pmtiles/

The problem I found with pmtiles is not many servers support the required HTTP attributes. You need to carefully assess ahead of time.

I believe it's only range requests you need supported. there's also cool sqlite querying and flatgeobufs that can do fancy lookups on large single file formats

Yeah. I don't know exactly how widely supported range requests are - my first few attempts turned up a few duds.

PMTiles is great for a static background. You can easily do a layer on top with geojson like you say, or even just by storing your own data in postgres and using postgis ST_AsMVT to turn it into a vector tile layer. Stick a cachebuster in the URL & a http cache in front and you can call it a day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com