Friday, 4 April 2014

Moving to Leaflet and Openstreetmap

Until a few weeks ago, all embedded maps on Trackprofiler were based on Google maps, but I've made a switch to Leaflet powered maps with MapBox powered layers based on Openstreetmap data and Bing maps layer for aerial imagery. The functionality is more-or-less the same as before.

Why the switch? Google maps is still a great solution which thought me a lot about mapping and online geographical programming, but there are some important reasons why I decided to rewrite a big part of Trackprofiler:

  • I believe that Openstreetmap is the future of mapping. It is a great community doing great efforts to create the best map data ever,
  • Leaflet.js is a great mapping Javascript library, it is fast and easy to work with,
  • Too restrictive terms of service,
  • This allowed me to rewrite legacy parts of the application and this, in turn, will help to implement even more new features...

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