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


So far, we have investigated various ways to create and customize maps. At the beginning, we used the Mapbox user interface to create some simple styling on the maps, and then we explored recipes to utilize Mapbox services using PHP and Node.js. In the previous chapter, we also introduced CartoCSS, the stylesheet language that will help us to customize a map with absolute control.

None of the recipes, however, covered how to build dynamic maps and display features, such as markers, on the fly. This is what we will do in this chapter, and our backing technology is a JavaScript framework called Mapbox.js.

Mapbox.js inherits from another framework called Leaflet. Leaflet was created by Vladimir Agafonkin and various other contributors, and it's extremely popular and simple to integrate and use. It takes advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 in modern browsers but is also compatible with older ones.

Leaflet's features include covering, displaying, and overlaying layers and creating markers,...