JS, MapBox, & Maps

Recap

  • We’ve learned about
    • The history of web maps
    • Common data structures
    • Raster and vector tiles
    • How to upload data & create tiles in Mapbox
    • How to stylize tiles in Mapbox

We could make our maps manually, but…

  • Time consuming
  • Hard to automatically updates
  • Limited features available to us

A programming interface will allow for faster updates and more advanced features.

  • We can also customize our projects way more than we could manually
  • We can also integrate interaction, loops, conditionals, etc.

We’ll use JavaScript.

  • Supported by all modern web browsers
  • Object oriented
  • Lots of great APIs
    • Application programming interface
  • APIs
    • Essentially a tool box that you access through computer code
    • Pre-written methods/functions that you can call that complete common tasks

APIs and Maps