As you start making more maps and looking for geospatial data to work with, you will almost certainly run into the file type shapefile (.shp). Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) is the creator of the most widely used GIS system, ArcGIS, and the shapefile is one of their data formats.
You may see another format called geodatabase with a .gdb extension. Even if you never run into a shapefile or geodatabase, you will eventually run into a REST service that is an endpoint to an ArcServer installation.
Note
ArcServer is an ESRI product for distributing GIS services and web mapping applications. It is separate from ArcGIS, which refers to the desktop application to create maps and geographic data.
The more data formats you know how to consume in your Leaflet maps, the less time you will need to spend converting data to suit your needs. In this chapter, you will learn how to consume ESRI formats and services in Leaflet.
In this chapter, we will cover the following...