Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

By : Kastanakis
Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

By: Kastanakis

Overview of this book

Maps are an essential element in today’s location aware applications. Right from displaying earth surface information to creating thematic maps displaying plethora of information, most of the developers lack the necessary knowledge to create customizable maps with combination of various tools and libraries. The MapBox platform is one such platform which offers all the tools and API required to create and publish a totally customizable map. Starting with building your first map with the online MapBox Editor, we will take you all the way to building advanced web and mobile applications with totally customizable map styles. Through the course of chapters we’ll learn CartoCSS styling language and understand the various components of MapBox platform and their corresponding JavaScript API. In the initial few chapters we will dive deeper into the TileMill and MapBox Studio components of MapBox and use them to generate custom styled map tiles and vector maps. Furthermore, we will publish these custom maps using PHP, node.js and third party tools like Geoserver. We’ll also learn to create different visualizations and map styles like a choropleth map, a heat map and add user interactivity using a UFTGrid. Moving on, we dive into advanced concepts and focus on integration with third party services like Foursquare, Google FusionTables, CartoDB, and Torque to help you populate and even animate your maps. In the final chapter we’ll learn to use the Mapbox SDK to create and publish interactive maps for the iOS platform. By the end of this book, you will learn about MapBox GL and how to create a fully functional, location-aware mobile app, using the maps styles created in the recipes.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)
7
Index

Finding an address from coordinates

The exact opposite of the process we saw just now is to provide the coordinates and get back an address, which is called reverse geocoding.

Let's examine the request structure, which is as follows:

http://api.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/geocode/{index}/{lon},{lat}.json?access_token=<your access token>

At this point, it won't trouble you any more to find what is needed. Apart from index, this time, we need to provide the latitude and longitude.

How to do it…

Perform the following steps:

  1. Construct a GET request by specifying the master source, latitude, and longitude.
  2. Paste the request in the browser or in a REST client.

    You will get back a JSON file with coordinates matching your query.

A complete reverse geocoding query will look similar to this:

http://api.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/geocode/mapbox.places-v1/-6.348457,53.712829.json?access_token=pk.eyJ1Ijoibmltcm9kNyIsImEiOiJkNkw1WWRnIn0.pnQn9P2nbHyhKf2FY_XJog
How to do it…