Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

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 (13 chapters)
Mapbox Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Up until now, we have used Mapbox Editor to create and customize our maps. We have seen how feature-rich and powerful it is and how, using just a web interface to customize your map, it provides you with so many possibilities. We were able to totally customize the color theme, add markers and features, and customize their appearance.

Although powerful, there are times when you need more control. What if we want to change the widths of the lines that represent roads? What if we want to totally customize this width over different zoom levels? What if we want a custom font, or even better, a different font (or font size) at each zoom level? What if we want to hide or show features when a user zooms in or out?

The possibilities are endless, and the power of unlocking this level of customization lies in a language called CartoCSS. Well, it's not exactly a language like C++ or PHP, with objects and complicated memory management, but it is a much more user-friendly, stylesheet-like...