GISmap v0.9.0 — Early Public Release

Release date: August 2026
Status: Early public release / pre-1.0

GISmap is a lightweight, client-side web GIS designed to make it easy to view, explore, and interact with geospatial data directly in a web browser.

The project is particularly focused on working with Esri ArcGIS REST services and locally uploaded spatial data without requiring a dedicated backend, desktop GIS installation, or custom application deployment.

This v0.9.0 release represents the first public open-source version of GISmap. The core application is functional and useful today, but several parts of the project — particularly project persistence, symbology, configuration, and the overall user experience — are still evolving.

The project is being released early both to make the tool available to others and to encourage feedback, experimentation, and contributions from the GIS and web-mapping communities.

What GISmap Does

GISmap provides a browser-based workspace for quickly opening and interacting with GIS data.

Current capabilities include:

• Connect to and display compatible ArcGIS REST services
• Explore layers from ArcGIS FeatureServer and MapServer resources
• Work with spatial data directly in the browser
• Load supported local GIS files and datasets
• Interact with mapped features
• Inspect feature attributes and underlying GIS data
• Control layer visibility and map presentation
• Combine remote GIS services and local data in the same map
• Work without a GIS server or application-specific backend
• Run as a lightweight static JavaScript application

One of the primary goals of GISmap is to make common GIS exploration tasks extremely quick.

A typical workflow should be as simple as:

Open GISmap → provide a GIS service or dataset → explore the map.

Why GISmap?

There are many excellent GIS platforms and JavaScript mapping libraries available. GISmap is not intended to replace ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, QGIS, or full web GIS development frameworks.

Instead, GISmap is intended to fill a simpler niche:

Give me a GIS service or spatial file and let me look at it.

GIS professionals frequently encounter ArcGIS REST endpoints, files, and datasets that they simply need to inspect, visualize, compare, or explore.

GISmap aims to make that process fast and accessible without requiring the user to first build a web application or create a GIS project in a larger platform.

Client-Side by Design

GISmap is currently a client-side JavaScript application.

There is no GISmap application server, database, or API required to run the core application.

This makes GISmap:

• easy to host
• easy to fork
• easy to deploy
• inexpensive to operate
• suitable for static hosting platforms
• useful as both a standalone tool and a starting point for custom GIS applications

The public repository contains the client-side GISmap application only.

Project Files

GISmap includes an early concept of project files, allowing a mapping session to be represented as a portable project that can later be reopened.

This functionality is still under active development and will become a major focus between v0.9 and v1.0.

The goal is for a GISmap project to eventually preserve information such as:

• map extent and viewpoint
• configured GIS services
• layer ordering
• layer visibility
• layer opacity
• basemap selection
• layer names
• filters
• popup configuration
• labels
• symbology and renderers
• other map presentation settings

The intention is to make GISmap projects small, portable representations of a map workspace rather than copies of all of the underlying data.

For remote services, a project can reference the original ArcGIS REST endpoint and restore the map configuration when reopened.

The project-file structure should be considered experimental in v0.9 and may change prior to GISmap 1.0.

Symbology

Basic visualization and layer presentation are available today, but richer symbology support is one of the main areas of development for the upcoming releases.

Planned improvements include better persistence of symbology inside GISmap project files and more complete support for common GIS rendering approaches.

Potential areas of development include:

• single-symbol rendering
• unique-value rendering
• graduated or class-break rendering
• color and symbol configuration
• opacity
• labels
• saved renderer definitions
• restoration of renderer settings when reopening a project

The exact symbology model and project-file representation are not yet considered stable.

What v0.9 Means

GISmap v0.9 should be considered an early but usable release.

The project is being made public before v1.0 intentionally.

At this stage:

• core functionality works
• the application can already be useful for real GIS exploration
• APIs and internal JavaScript structures may change
• the GISmap project-file format may change
• some workflows need additional polish
• some GIS formats and service configurations may not yet be supported
• error handling and documentation are still being improved
• UI and mobile behavior may continue to evolve

Users should not yet assume backward compatibility between every pre-1.0 release.

Road to GISmap 1.0

The primary goals for the 1.0 release include:

• stabilize the GISmap project format
• improve project save and restore
• preserve more layer symbology in project files
• improve ArcGIS REST service handling
• improve uploaded-data workflows
• improve error reporting for unsupported or inaccessible services
• improve user interface consistency
• improve documentation
• provide example projects and datasets
• make it easier for developers to extend GISmap

Additional formats and capabilities may be added as the project develops.

Who GISmap Is For

GISmap may be useful for:

• GIS analysts
• GIS developers
• ArcGIS administrators
• consultants
• local and state government GIS teams
• researchers
• students
• open-data users
• developers debugging GIS services
• anyone who regularly receives ArcGIS REST URLs or spatial files and wants to quickly see what they contain

Developers may also find GISmap useful as a lightweight starting point for their own specialized browser-based GIS applications.

Open Source

GISmap is being released as an open-source project so that others can use it, learn from it, extend it, and contribute improvements.

Contributions, bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation improvements, and experiments are welcome.

In particular, contributions around the following areas would be valuable:

• ArcGIS REST compatibility
• local GIS file support
• symbology
• project persistence
• user interface improvements
• accessibility
• mobile GIS workflows
• documentation
• performance
• new GIS data formats

Try GISmap

The official hosted version is available at:

https://gismap.online/

Because GISmap runs primarily in the browser, the hosted application provides a quick way to experiment with the project without installing or deploying anything.

Feedback

This is an early release, so feedback is especially useful.

If you encounter a service that GISmap cannot load, a dataset that behaves unexpectedly, or a workflow that could be substantially easier, please open an issue in the GitHub repository.

Examples and reproducible test cases are particularly helpful.

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GISmap v0.9.0 is the beginning of the public project, not the finished product.

The goal is to develop GISmap into a simple, capable, and portable browser GIS for the everyday task of opening spatial data and understanding what is there.