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

Publishing your base map on your server with Node.js

As we explained in the previous chapter, PHP is not the ideal technology to use to serve our tiles. This is not because PHP is a bad language or anything similar; it's because there are other technologies that excel in multithreading operations, which is exactly what's needed when serving tiles at an enormous speed.

In this recipe, we will use TileStream, which is a high-performance tile server powered by MBTiles. TileStream is maintained by Mapbox and uses Node.js and SQLite as the backend technologies.

In the preceding PHP recipe, we converted the tiles to the XYZ format to squeeze out any performance benefits while serving the tiles. Node.js doesn't have any performance issues while reading the tiles directly from the MBTiles container, which is just a SQLite database, so we don't need to convert the tiles in this case.

We can use the MBTiles we exported in the previous recipe. Then we will download TileStream from...