Fossgis: from WMS to WMTS to vector tiles - Primin Kalberer¶

Tags: fossgis, geo

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 fossgis conference).

He showed a vector tile demo with https://www.mapbox.com/maps/ . The maps render very quickly when you move around or zoom in. Very fluid.

Mapbox’ vector tile standard is the de-facto standard

• Protocol buffer format. Binary format, streamable.

• The tiles are 256x256 plus buffer.

• The geometry is in display coordinates: the format really is optimized for rendering!

• It supports multipoint/multiline/multipolygon.

• You can attach data attributes to the features.

With WMS, you don’t have tiling problems. You render all labels optimally. WMTS has a big advantage over WMS: scalability and caching (both server and client). Vector tiles has the same scalability and caching advantages. In addition, it gives you interactivity, a higher resolution and other advantages.

To render your own tiles, you need a tile server that generates PBF files out of, for instance, a postgis database. Once you have the PBF files, you don’t need to talk to the database anymore. A webserver can serve the PBF files together with a styling file for the mapbox client-side javascript vector library.

Vector tile servers: node-mapnik, kartotherian, tilezen, tessera, tegola, geoserver and others. Most of them are virtually undocumented. He himself created t-rex.