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

Creating a simple map


In this recipe, we will explore how we can integrate Mapbox.js into a project. We will use the absolute minimum code, and we will just display a simple map.

How to do it…

We have to create a simple HTML5 file that will include the necessary Mapbox.js JavaScript and CSS files.

We will also create our own CSS file to create some basic styling for our #map div that will contain the map. In main.js, we will initialize Mapbox.js and provide our Mapbox access token. Then, we will create a simple map by providing the basic coordinates. Perform the following steps:

  1. Open up the chapter-4-example1-starter folder. This folder contains an HTML5 index.html file, a css folder with a style.css file, and a main.js file. The project isn't linked to Mapbox.js yet; we will do this next.

    The style.css file contains some basic styling for the #map div. It will style the div with 100% width and 800px height, with no margins. This div will contain our map.

    We will use main.js to write our JavaScript...