protomaps.js Overview
Protomaps.js is a vector map renderer for the web. It's available on GitHub under a permissive, BSD 3-Clause License. Its key features include:
- It renders vector tiles following the MVT specification, supported by tools like PostGIS.
- It displays labels for point, line and polygon features.
- It handles tile fetching and caching, label collision, and labels across tiles.
- The rendering of features and labels is controlled via a style specification.
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protomaps.js is not...- It is not a continuous-zoom system. It displays map tiles at discrete integer zoom levels.
- It is not a 3D renderer. Protomaps.js is focused on rendering 2D maps from OpenStreetMap data.
- It is not based on WebGL. It instead uses the web-standard Canvas drawing API.
If your use case demands a continuous-zoom, WebGL-powered, 3D webmap renderer, look at Alternate Renderers for Protomaps data and APIs.
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protomaps.js is...- Fast. It aims to offer the same user experience as traditional raster slippy maps, but with full client-side customization and device-native resolution.
- Simple. It is single-threaded and less than 30kb minified and gzipped.
- Easy to integrate. It is simply a tile layer in a Leaflet map, letting you develop with the entire ecosystem of Leaflet plugins.
- Flexible. Protomaps.js is written in TypeScript. Instead of customization via JSON or XML, map symbology is extensible at runtime by implementing your own Symbolizers.