Despite their dominance of the industry, there is more to GIS than the Esri suite of products. While it has tremendous value and is the most feature-packed solution on the market there is still a place for a lightweight, open source alternative. One of the most popular is the Javascript based Leaflet library. Leaflet is best described by this excerpt from their website:
“Leaflet is designed with simplicity, performance and usability in mind. It works efficiently across all major desktop and mobile platforms out of the box, taking advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 on modern browsers while still being accessible on older ones. It can be extended with a huge amount of plugins, has a beautiful, easy to use and well-documented API and a simple, readable source code that is a joy to contribute to.”
As a quick example, I adapted some data from an Esri-based Story Map that I recently made into an interactive web map made using leaflet. This map shows informative data for all 47 breweries, brewpubs, and client brewers in the state of Georgia. Clicking on the points will produce a pop-up with said data. The point clustering was accomplished by utilizing a leaflet plugin called Marker Cluster.
The source code from this test project may be found via my Github page linked below.
Chris Rice
GIS Analyst I
Github
@crice937
crice@interdev.com