I used a similar mapping library, <a href="http://openlayers.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openlayers.org/</a> , around 4 years ago. It thought it was nice at the time. The documentation wasn't great, but there were decent examples and the support for GIS standards like WMS and WFS was solid. It looks like people have increasingly become dissatisfied with it and started working on alternatives like leaftlet.<p><a href="http://vmx.cx/cgi-bin/blog/index.cgi/wherecampeu-2011:2011-05-29:en,GeoCouch,OpenLayers,MapQuery,conference,geo" rel="nofollow">http://vmx.cx/cgi-bin/blog/index.cgi/wherecampeu-2011:2011-0...</a><p><a href="http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/472/perceived-flaws-ofopenlayers/" rel="nofollow">http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/472/perceived-flaws-ofope...</a><p><a href="http://notes.tommacwright.com/post/6010879882/openlayers" rel="nofollow">http://notes.tommacwright.com/post/6010879882/openlayers</a>
Looks great. Has anyone compared this and the google maps api? I'm working on a GIS project and we're going to do some stuff in js for the web so I'm very curious.
I love that this uses OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps, as I like being able to control all my own data and not be reliant upon MegaCorp (TM) for my site to function. At the same time, I've never seen an OSM API that seemed both as useful and as simple as the Google Maps API, but this looks pretty nice.<p>I may have to wipe the dust off RateMyStudentRental.com and retrofit Leaflet at some point.
For some reason the map travels behind my cursor as I drag it around. This would drive me away if I was looking for an alternative mapping library to google maps.
Tried the demo really quickly (Mac OS X 10.6/Safari 5) but I got rendering errors without breaking a sweat:<p><a href="http://www.shaggyfrog.com/junk/leaflet-rendering-errors.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.shaggyfrog.com/junk/leaflet-rendering-errors.png</a><p>Based on it breaking so easily I wouldn't consider this an an alternative to Google Maps quite yet.
Leaflet is just great. I made a demo as soon as I heard about it a few weeks ago. I combined leaflet on the client side with varnish as a tile cache and nginx as a tile server. I plan to switch to node.js as soon as it supports sendfile.<p><a href="http://maps.cloudno.de" rel="nofollow">http://maps.cloudno.de</a>
I've been using mapstraction (<a href="https://github.com/mapstraction/mxn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mapstraction/mxn</a>) and like it; don't see much different here. Maybe someone should introduce them to each other.