One post tagged with "iconmappro"

In our February release of Icon Map Pro, you’ll notice a new settings option, “Rendering”, so I thought I’d explain in more detail what’s behind this option, and why it’s there.

Let’s start by explaining a bit more about the code libraries that Icon Map Pro uses to draw the map. If you go back to when I first created the original Icon Map visual nearly 10 years ago, there were 2 main opensource libraries used for creating web maps, OpenLayers and a more lightweight library, Leaflet.

The original Icon Map was built on top of Leaflet, which provided great support for most of the features required for mapping in Power BI. It also had a wide range of plugins available which added some of the more advanced capabilities.

At Tekantis, when we started to write Icon Map Pro last year, we didn’t want to provide fewer capabilities than were available in the older Icon Map visual, so again we chose Leaflet to ensure we were able to provide the full range of features.

However, Icon Map Pro is capable of drawing more rows of data than the original visual, which was limited to 20,000, then later 30,000 rows. When drawing large amount of complex objects, or images on the map, Leaflet starts to suffer from performance issues. We therefore started to look at how to overcome this.

A lot has happened in the web mapping world in the last 10 years. Volodymyr Agafonkin, who created the original Leaflet library, started to work for Mapbox and created a new map library that was built using WebGL rendering, using the power of the GPU for better performance. Whilst this library was initially open source, at some point Mapbox forked the library to create version 3, after which a Mapbox license key was required to use it.

The version 2 library became the Maplibre project and development of this library has continued separately to the Mapbox library. It’s this Maplibre library that is the foundation for many other mapping libraries such as the Azure Maps JavaScript API.

In Icon Map Pro we’ve been using a plugin that uses Maplibre on top of Leaflet to provide some of the features such as our vector tiles based background mapping. We’ve also provided some experimental layers using WebGL to provide better performance for rendering large GeoJSON layers for example. However, using this plugin has limitations as each layer using WebGL created a separate instantiation of Maplibre and WebGL, and we therefore started to hit limitations in regard to the number of WebGL instances possible, and in terms of memory.

In the February release of Icon Map Pro, we’re removed the experimental WebGL options (for new maps) and replaced them with a new WebGL rendering option. This now uses a single Maplibre instance to draw all the overlay and data-bound layers, which means we don’t hit the same limitations. It’s also enabled some additional functionality where items overlap on the map, such as combined tooltips.

To enable this, we’ve made it a single choice between using WebGL via Maplibre vs traditional rendering via Leaflet. In this initial release, not all overlay and data-bound layer types are available, but we’re planning to enable all of them going forward.

Currently we’re still using the Maplibre plugin for Leaflet, so all the current controls are available. The downside of this however, is that additional features such as the ability to rotate and tilt the map are not available, as these aren’t supported by Leaflet.

In a future release, we’re aiming to provide an additional option that will only use Maplibre, and we can therefore add these additional capabilities.