I’m a little behind on blogging, so this is a little old but it’s definitely worth mentioning again. If you’re building web apps and need map capabilities, you should definitely take a look at Leaflet. Leaflet is now at v1 so that’s a great sign for anyone using Leaflet. I also like how the first item on the changelog is that they have made major performance improvements. It’s a great sign from the team when that’s the first thing the highlight. The full list of changes in this release are:
- Huge performance improvements in all aspects of the library and vector layers in particular.
- New
L.Tooltipclass for all your dynamic labeling needs. - Flyover animations (zooming and panning in a curve with
map.flyTo). - Fractional zoom level support (
map.setZoom(12.34)). - Much better tile loading algorithm with less flickering.
- Custom pane management (including multiple vector layer panes and interleaving vectors and tile layers).
- Better support for non-standard projections.
- More accessibility features.
- Vastly improved documentation.
- Tons of bugfixes and stability improvements.
The update also discusses a new release cycle to help improve the speed of releases. After paying down some major technical debt, it looks like the team will start to release more updates frequently. And it’s great to see that they’re already releasing more often. Leaflet v1.0.1 has already gone out.
And there are some other initiatives they are going to pursue:
- A cleaner, more stable plugin ecosystem. We want to make sure that all popular plugins work well with the latest release and are maintained. We’ll revise our plugin list page, tighten our review process, take more key plugins under the wing of the Leaflet organization on GitHub and spend more time working on them.
- Tutorials and examples to cover more advanced features of the library, its popular plugins, and integrations with libraries like D3 and React/Angular.
- Explore switching to a more modern JavaScript flavor and module system (ES6, Babel, Rollup).
- Map rotation support.