(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.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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