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

Working with base layers


In this recipe, we will explore layers. Actually, we already added a base layer in the previous recipes using the addLayer(<ILayer> layer) method.

One of the advantages of the Mapbox API is the power to add multiple overlaid layers at runtime, which is an extremely useful feature that allows us to switch between different types of data without using a different map.

How to do it…

We will add a base layer on our map. This layer will be displayed when the page is displayed when first opening the browser.

Then, we will use hasLayer(<ILayer> layer) to check whether a layer is already on the map, and if not, we will add it with addLayer(<ILayer> layer). In case a layer is already on the map, we will remove it first using removeLayer(<ILayer> layer).

There are various types of layers. The first type is a base layer, which can display tiles from various sources, such as Mapbox Street, Mapbox Terrain, or Mapbox Satellite. The second type of layer is an...