Leaflet

In case you missed the big news, the Apocalypse was supposed to drop by this last weekend. Since it seems everyone missed it, I guess we need a map now to find it. That reverend-liar-bastard surely disappeared to continue his quest to find it and show it to the world… so I can be sure about one thing: he’s using a map. Hahaha… but it’s not funny, considering that the idiot received donations estimated to be around (in fact AT LEAST) $70 million!!! Well, let’s leave this shit aside and move to the maps, the only part of the story above that makes any sense, as well as Leaflet, today’s maps-related topic, shall we?

I know this doesn’t look good to many people and I am not crazy about it, either, but one of the best way to describe a piece of code is, at least sometimes, to use the description coming from the people behind it, so here’s that one for Leaflet: “Leaflet is a modern, lightweight BSD-licensed JavaScript library for making tile-based interactive maps for both desktop and mobile web browsers, developed by CloudMade to form the core of its next generation JavaScript API.”

Freely available and very easy to use, Leaflet is both extensible and modular, offering support for quite a few features, including drag panning, animated zoom, double-click- and scroll wheel-powered zoom, image overlays, even hardware acceleration on iOS, smart polyline/polygon rendering and many others. A detailed list of features can be found right here, while the examples are waiting for you on this page.

At last, I think I should add a few words about browsers support, because this part looks awesome: Firefox 3.6+, Chrome, Safari 5+, Opera 11.11+ and IE 7–9 on desktops, while mobile platforms running Safari for iOS 3/4+ and WebKit for Android 2.2+ browsers shouldn’t have any problems with Leaflet, either. That’s all for today, folks! 😉