peermaps-web

Map web application for peermaps

usage

Get the code, install and run:

$ git clone https://github.com/peermaps/peermaps-web.git
$ cd peermaps-web
$ npm install
$ npm start

Open the browser at http://localhost:9966.

build

Running npm run build will result in a public/ folder with static content that you can serve with a web server of your choice.

settings

via config.json

Configuration can be provided in a config.json file. There's a config.default.json file with default values. The following properties can be configured:

• bbox (array of floats): the starting viewbox for the map
• style (object)
  • style.url (string) file name for styling
• fonts (object)
  • fonts.endpoints (array of objects)
    • fonts.endpoints[].url (string) data source url
    • fonts.endpoints[].description (string) font description
    • fonts.endpoints[].active (boolean) true if the data source is active, otherwise false
• swarmOpts (object) configuration for hyperswarm-web
  • swarmOpts.bootstrap (array of strings)
    • swarmOpts.bootstrap[] (string) url to websocket server (e.g. ws:// or wss:// url)
• settings (object)
  • settings.storage (object) configuration for the storage tab in the settings dialog
    • settings.storage.endpoints (array of objects)
      • settings.storage.endpoints[].url (string) data source url
      • settings.storage.endpoints[].description (string) data source description
      • settings.storage.endpoints[].zoom (array of integers) zoom range for this data source
      • settings.storage.endpoints[].active (boolean) true if data source is active, otherwise false
  • settings.ui (object)
    • settings.ui.locale (string) default locale
  • settings.search (object)
    • settings.search.retryLimit (number) how many times to retry fetching search results, default is -1, which is retry indefinitely
    • settings.search.endpoints (array of objects)
      • settings.search.endpoints[].url (string) data source url
      • settings.search.endpoints[].description (string) data source description
      • settings.search.endpoints[].type (string) type of data source, currently only supporting 'sparse-geonames'
      • settings.search.endpoints[].active (boolean) true if data source is active, otherwise false

If you want to run your own version of peermaps-web with a different configuration, you can copy config.default.json to config.json before running npm run build or npm start.

via url search parameters

The following settings can be set via url search parameters:

• data (string) url to data source, defaults to https://peermaps.linkping.org/data (taken from the first active url in config.settings.storage.endpoints matching the current zoom level)
• bbox (comma separated string 'minx,miny,maxx,maxy') view bounding box, defaults to '7.56,47.55,7.58,47.56' (taken from config.bbox)
• lonlat (comma separated string 'lon,lat') map center position, temporary url parameter that will generate a suitable value for bbox
• style (string) url to shader style png, defaults to style.png (taken from config.style.url)

Example http://localhost:9966/#data=http://localhost:8000 would set the data source to http://localhost:8000.

localization

To add a new language you need to do the following:

• add the locale to the locales array in lib/i18n.js
• add translations to the corresponding locale object

webxdc

NOTE This is very much a work in progress and mostly for trying things out and getting to some form of proof of concept. Main questions we want to ask right now are:

• can we run peermaps-web as a .xdc app at all?
• how big is the resulting .xdc file?
• how do we get map data? bundle it? how will that affect the application size?
• alternatives to bundling data?

The short answer, is that we have managed to build a .xdc file and launch it inside Delta Chat on Android. Some takeaways are:

• the application size without map data is about 280k, so when it comes to code logic we have a quite a bit more we can use up, this is also due to the use of tinyify
• the application size goes up to over a megabyte when the map data is bundled, so this is not a good long term solution, or maybe incentive to try and minimize the map data as much as possible
• there are issues with webgl extensions (webgl in itself seems fine), different webviews have different support for this, you might need to manually disable some of them in app.js

You can bundle a webxdc app yourself with the following basic steps:

• npm install
• npm run build:webxdc
• attach the resulting peermaps.xdc to a chat

NOTE currently this only works on a modified version of deltachat-desktop, where ipfs cat calls are made to the local ipfs daemon and funneled back when a fetch() call is made to ipfs://${CIDv1} urls. This is done in a streaming fashion.

To get this modified version you can do e.g.:

cd $(mktemp -d) && git clone https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-desktop.git -b ipfs-experimental && cd deltachat-desktop && npm i && npm run dev

How do we take it further from here? Some questions:

• can we get rid of the webgl extensions altogether? at least the most problematic ones? -> this would make it easier to run the app on different systems and webviews
• there's also the webxdc api that we haven't touched on yet to interact between different instances for a different user experience, maybe sharing POIs and whatnot

license

bsd