Dynamic tiles and grids
I’ve been researching hybrids of modern web mapping technologies for a product we’re currently developing.
So we can’t use the Google Maps protocolbuffer-vector-tiles-rendered-by-webgl approach yet. OpenLayers3 and OpenScienceMap hint at a bright future in this regard, but for now we’re stuck with bitmap tiles.
But we want some interactivity and on-demand rendering with authentication, dynamic filtering and on-the-fly styling. So I made a little proof of concept demo using our PostGIS database, node.js and a modified version of Windshaft.
Watch this on Vimeo.</p>
Summary of this technology:
- Tiles are served by Node.js/Windshaft using four evented workers
- Pre- and post render hooks allow for custom authentication
- Styling can be updated using a JSON post containing CartoCSS rules (using Millstone and Grainstore)
- Caching of tiles can be enabled and disabled by specifying it in the GET request in Leaflet/OL
- Two layers (UTFGrid and the orange dots) are requested using an SQL query which can be modified by the DAT.gui controller