PMTiles VS headway

I am a novice at GIS and mapping but when I got started I thought a map/tile server was the only way to build mapping webapps.

But, in my admittedly simple application PMTiles can cover a lot of my visualization use cases with a thing Django app doing GEOJson for interactive stuff.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

This is awesome. Such a great use case for nix.

I do a lot of geospatial processing in the cloud and I've been using Tippecanoe a lot to create vector tiles. It pairs well with PM Tiles for storing on the cloud. It seriously increases the web app performance for massive data sets. I queue these up with ECS tasks to process our json/csv/parquet input and create optimize vector tile outputs.

https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

Tippecanoe would be a great addition to your nix packages. I've been thinking more and more about how Nix could fit into this pipeline.

Great work!

The thing being discussed is designed for cloud, so I think self managed is a better description?

https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn

Self hosting pmtiles is straightforward also, make a file available to a server that supports range requests:

https://protomaps.com/docs/pmtiles#2.-serve-your-file-locall...

It might've just been this: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/main/serverless/aws

There isn't a tool to do that right now. It could be a fit in either https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles or https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/main/python - the Go program is faster and more production ready at this point. I imagine if folders are working for you the quantity of tiles doesn't number into the millions, so the Python program might be sufficient.

Feel free to open an issue.

PMTiles

For the next revision of the JS decoder I'm including `fflate` as a dependency so clients can decompress gzipped tile data using JavaScript.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/master/js/package....

You might want to peek at https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway . I have never used it myself, but it at least shows how to integrate the different pieces.

The individual software components often have alternative with a similar scope. So if you don't like a choice headwaymaps made, browse around.

The data sources are mostly "unique", i.e. everybody downloads from the pages (Geofabrik, Who's On First, etc), so not much to gain here.

Editing styles has some alternatives, but the OpenSource editors are far away from the quality of the Mapbox editor. Maputnik or editing the 1000+ SLOC JSON by hand are the way to go, imo.

Personally I use GeoFabrik to download OSM extracts → osmconvert to extract the smaller bounding box I am interested in → tilemaker to render vector tiles to individual .pbf files I can serve like it's 1999. The bounding box extract is not necessary, but it's much faster if you need to tweak things in tilemaker. Both tilemaker and osmconvert are packaged for at least Debian out of the box, so setup is easy enough. Rendering a decently sized metro area takes < 30mins with this from scratch of compute, < 5min with the bounding box extract.

Note that adding icons (sprites) or fonts is extra work that comes on top. And while the tools themselves are great, there's still a lot of gluing/plumbing/fitting things together that you'll need to do. If headwaymaps works for you, it's probably the easiest choice.

In a similar vain, there is maps.earth / headway:

https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway

https://about.maps.earth/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551273

Another self hostable OSM stack that seems promising is headway

About: https://about.maps.earth/

Something like this? https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway