7+ years to be exact. It's unfair to call Leaflet dead — it's still quite actively maintained, gets regular releases and has a huge community of both users and contributors, and Mapbox have always been supportive of me spending time on it during work hours.
What someone can see as less development activity is simply a sign of a mature product that doesn't need many new features and changes to remain useful — focusing on the core basic mapping needs has always been its goal, and it continues to adhere to it.
Thanks for replying and all your amazing work :) !
What I see or meant as a sign of "dead" is that there will be no new features that Mapbox GL JS has but that are critical for future applications. Like proper or inbuilt vector tiles support.
Reading this comment makes me a bit sad because I wrote a really good incremental tile based renderer for leaflet that could easily be adapted for vector tiles.
Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one
> Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one
I'd encourage you to reach out and ask for permission to release it. In the past I've found that the sticking point was usually copyright assignment rather than the release per-se (with a side helping of worry over hidden IP violations), so get them to release a tarball under a permissive license like MIT/BSD, even if your intention is to immediately fork it.
Basically, if you can manage to do the work for them so they can just rubber stamp the release, you can probably get it done.
I suspect Leaflet's current install base is many times that of any alternative - it's certainly not dead, and I'd argue its simplicity makes it ideal for most basic mapping applications.
That would be great. There are a practically infinite number of things we could improve, and without feedback we won't end up working on the ones that matter to people.
I’ll add cesium also has commercial support and has been doing this for a while. It’s excellent. Patrick Cozzi and crew really know their stuff, highly recommend.
+1 for CesiumJS, they have been doing 3D since ages... Also webpage mentions its Open Source from 2012 until Forever (Apache 2.0). I guess its time to switch.
Will any of these work with LIDAR data under their 3D rendering?
I'm keen on industrial archaeology and it's really helpful to have 3D visualisations of sites like old quarries.
Stand-alone 3D models can be done like [1] and the detail is substantially better compared to the map 3D views [2] (pits are pits again!) but I want to embed these into a website and start overlaying other data - just like I can with Mapbox maps.
Note that deck.gl was originally developed inside Uber, but was donated to the Urban Computing Foundation (part of the Linux Foundation) and is now under open governance.
* openlayers, but vector tiles have no web GL support there
* Procedural GL JS
* tangram
* deck.gl (from Uber)
* harp.gl (from HERE Maps)