I have not looked at PMTiles, so far everything holds nicely generated in memory, so I haven't had the need to store this information. I'll keep it in mind.
Any idea why Mapbox GL JS doesn't support GeoJSON vector tiles?
> I have not looked at PMTiles, so far everything holds nicely generated in memory
For a planet-scale project that I worked on, a multi-layer PMTiles set generated from GeoJSON by Tippecanoe reduced the amount of storage needed by about 60% vs. MVT, at the cost of a longer build time. Result was a single file served by MapLibre on a static web server, no tileserver needed.
The storage savings allowed us to add 3 additional zoom levels on the same cheap, storage-constrained VPS host that ran the web server. We considered moving it to S3, which would be much easier with PMTiles since it's just a single file, but it would've only cost us more money and we didn't need edge caching.
As far as I know, the design of Mapbox GL JS was very heavily geared towards their own needs of producing high performance maps that would be loaded on millions of devices. Obviously they'd never use MVT in that use case, so they didn't bother supporting it.
There are lots of areas where they could have made the lives of developers a lot easier. Another that comes to mind is just how hard it is to look inside vector tiles - they don't really provide much in the way of tools for inspection, etc. I had to build https://stevage.github.io/vector-inspector/ and https://www.npmjs.com/package/tileinfo for instance.
hey, longtime Mapbox employee here. I appreciate all the work you're doing here to help people wrap their heads around vector tiles! This is an old technology at this point, and as you've explained, there are robust tools for moving from GeoJSON to tilesets. It's cool to pull apart the nuts and bolts of a thing (and the Mapbox Vector Tile Spec is open) but there are easier ways to accomplish this objective.
A question for you:
> Obviously they'd never use MVT in that use case, so they didn't bother supporting it.
What does this mean? Mapbox GL (JS and native) both support MVT, of course--that's why we created it! Perhaps you were referring to something else? Higher in this post I see a reference to "GeoJSON vector tiles" and I'm curious what that means. GeoJSON is very convenient (Mapbox helped support its enshrinement as IETF RFC 7496), but one of the hard parts of tiling is slicing features and knowing when to simplify them. Once you've done that, you might as well cram it into a protobuf or other highly efficient container. When you pass Mapbox GL a GeoJSON, it actually cuts the geometry into tiles in memory and uses those for rendering.
Some other general notes:
- the process of tiling is lossy (or should be). if you zoom out to see all of north america, your GeoJSON of neighborhood address points is going to overlap. you should drop most of them from the low-zoomlevel tiles. Tippecanoe does this in brilliant and highly tuneable ways. This applies to geometry simplification, too. Folks should keep this in mind when doing size comparisons.
- map tiling is fundamentally about moving compute into preprocessing and assembling geometry from highly parallelized fetches. MVT is a technology built on and for S3-like services. it's been exciting to see new approaches to this problem that offer lovely ergonomics around deployment etc, but if you have cloud infra, a hot cache, and are optimizing for performance, MVT remains hard to beat
- we continue to research additional optimizations for VT, but the technology has stood the test of time, and proven useful in many different contexts beyond map rendering, including routing and geocoding
Ugh, dumb typo - it was late. I meant "Obviously they'd never use GeoJSON in that use case".
> Higher in this post I see a reference to "GeoJSON vector tiles" and I'm curious what that means.
It's what it sounds like: vector tiles, but instead of protobuf, the data is simply passed directly as GeoJSON. Really convenient for a use case like a server that generates data on demand: easy to generate (ie, it avoids all the difficulty of OP's post), easy to inspect in the browser for debugging. Only downside is it's less efficient space-wise than protobuf. So it's useful as a first step for a proof of concept (to be replaced by MVT), or in a case where the size doesn't matter.
>Once you've done that, you might as well cram it into a protobuf or other highly efficient container.
I'm disputing the "you might as well" bit for many use cases. :) (Again, I think Mapbox is very geared towards large scale uses, but a lot of the internet is small and bespoke).
>MVT is a technology built on and for S3-like services.
It's interesting that you say that. My experience, having been down this road a few times, is that serving MVT from S3 is generally a pain that I don't recommend for new clients. It takes some pretty specific AWS configuration, and the process of uploading thousands of individual files is slow and error-prone. (I wrote a guide on it once but can't find it now).
Yeah it's a good solution for large-scale uses (again...) but not good for the average user.
PMTiles seems like a pretty compelling alternative for those scenarios: ship one file instead of thousands, and rely on HTTP range requests. The downside I ran into is that not all "S3-like services" support that.
In practice, I recommend either hosting data on Mapbox/MapTiler/whoever is cheapest this month if the volumes are low, or setting up a tiny tile server. Even a tiny server is sufficient for serving tiles, and costs a fraction of what Mapbox charges (especially since Mapbox's change to charging per square kilometre, which is absolutely cost prohibitive for sparse data).
>we continue to research additional optimizations for VT,
Can you elaborate? The spec (https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec) has not had an update in 4 years, and since MVT v2 did not include any substantive changes, the spec is essentially unchanged since 2014. In 2018, a working group for a version 3 was announced (https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec/issues/103) but then apparently quietly abandoned only a couple of months later.
Didn't mean to imply that tiling is trivial--our initial business model was focused on taking care of that difficulty for our customers, after all, and it wouldn't have made sense if we didn't think we were delivering value.
I will defer to your experience re the utility of tiled-but-still-GeoJSON as a sensible middle ground. I think you're right that we haven't seen this as an area that merits significant attention--it's sort of "not worth optimizing yet [geojson]" or "worth optimizing [MVT]". But I can see how there could be middle grounds in some scenarios.
PMtiles is what I had in mind when I mentioned ergonomics. Brandon's delivered a very compelling approach, as I hope I conveyed to him at CNG earlier this year. The lack of fully specified behavior re range requests is a lingering concern, as you acknowledge, and there are some other areas like incremental updates where having a huge mess of tiles still looks pretty good. But I think it's fair to say that it's overperformed as a solution, and I understand why people are excited about it and the other cloud-native geo formats that have emerged in recent years. Decades ago, Mapbox founders were at DevSeed writing PHP--there will always be some sympathy around here for "just upload it" as a deploy story!
I can't talk about the optimizations we are investigating, but I can at least acknowledge some of what makes the problem so hard (and the update schedule so slow): MVT is quite good, and backward compatibility is a pain, especially when you're optimizing for bundle/binary size (a particularly hard problem when your competitors get to preinstall their libraries on every mobile phone in the world) and working with a customer base that's preintegrated, in every way and to every extent imaginable, with an existing ecosystem. There is a reason people still use shapefiles! Though I hope MVT's reputation remains a bit better than that...
It's weird, I've done an absolute ton of work with random geospatial data from all kinds of sources (see opentrees.org), but when someone asks what format to supply data in, I often suggest Shapefile. There's a kind of rugged simplicity to it, like an old Nokia. It rarely goes wrong in strange ways, everything supports it, and its limitations (especially file size, field name length/casing, geometry mixing etc) tend not to be show-stoppers.
GeoPackage turned into such a complex beast that you have no idea what's going to be inside, I tend to avoid it at all costs.
Any idea why Mapbox GL JS doesn't support GeoJSON vector tiles?