Raster Basemaps Moving To Mature Support

[pmacMaps]

On July 17, 2019, Esri announced that raster basemaps will begin to enter Mature Support starting in 2020.

The article stated that when "a raster basemap service is in Mature Support, this indicates that there will no longer be any updates to the service." The article also states that vector tile basemaps will be the primary version of basemaps.

In #1160, it was stated that the experimental vector tiles plugin will be officially deprecated. How does this announcement regarding moving raster basemaps to Mature Support affect the Esri-Leaflet ecosystem?

[jwasilgeo]

For research purposes and leaving some breadcrumbs for any one of us able to look into this a bit more, could the Leaflet.VectorGrid plugin help us out here? A demo page from that repo is successfully wired up to an Esri v1 VectorTileServer.

This was originally found at https://leafletjs.com/plugins.html#vector-tiles. Please also take note of another related plugin just below: Leaflet.VectorTileLayer plugin.

[pmacMaps]

I had sometime to experiment with Leaflet.VectorGrid. I have a CodePen Demo.

I don't have much experience with vector tile, so not sure how much the demo matches the expected behavior.

Some initial thoughts:

• it doesn't appear that labels are supported with the Leaflet.VectorGrid plugin
• would there be a way to set the style based upon the JSON file for the selected vector basemap?

[jwasilgeo]

@pmacMaps thanks for poking around and coming up with a demo and some initial findings. I've nothing new to add to the conversation at the moment, unfortunately.

[patrickarlt]

This issue should be resolved by some new features in Vector Tile Services that were just released in 7.3. A more formal blog post/announcement is coming soon but Vector Tile Services will now dynamically generate tiles that are not in the index. So a previously 404'ing request to tiles/12/25/74.pbf that would normally be handled by the index will now return a proper tile to clients.

You can see proof of concepts in:

• https://codepen.io/patrickarlt/pen/YzKpjbW - Latest MapBox GL JS w/ Streets Night
• https://codepen.io/patrickarlt/pen/wvwoKmr - Latest MapBox GL JS w/ OSM in Leaflet

In the next few weeks I'm going to formally deprecate https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet-vector and replace it with 2 new plugins:

• Esri Leaflet Vector Basemap Layer (For using basemaps from the Living Atlas. Replacement for L.Esri.BasemapLayer)
• Esri Leaflet Vector Tile Layer (For custom vector tile services published from ArcGIS Pro)

I'll keep everyone updated on my progress but this means we finally have full vector tile support in Esri Leaflet!

[jgravois]

fantastic!

for the sake of continuity/avoiding churn, I'd rather see you gut the existing plugin and just publish a new major release.

just my two cents though. you're the one doing the work, so you're in the driver's seat.

[patrickarlt]

@jgravois that might make sense but I also might want to rename the vector tile repo. I'll make a final decision once I get in there and review the build process again :)

[jwasilgeo]

Exciting update! The esri-leaflet-vector plugin v3 was released recently and is a viable solution if you want to use vector tile basemaps (or other custom vector tile layers). It can be used as an alternative to raster basemaps if you wish.