09-11, 15:30–16:00 (America/Chicago), Grand G
Explore mapping applications in traditional websites using web components as an easy "plug-and-play" solution. Discover the power and benefits of maps as web components, with practical examples of building, testing, and using mapping components in content management systems.
As map enthusiasts working with geospatial technology, we often see maps at the center stage of a web application, but this isn’t the case for everyone. For most people, maps are solely for navigation, maybe finding nearby restaurants, or occasionally at the end of a web page to see where the place of interest is. There is huge potential for including more GIS in ordinary sites, such as blog sites. With more creative web mapping, GIS developers / mapmakers can express their creativity by introducing interactivity, and readers can get more information out of a web page without being taken out of the website’s ecosystem.
The problem is, website creators may not know the intricacies of developing modern web mapping applications. For example, are there any “plug-and-play” solutions that can make inserting a web map as easy as inserting a picture using HTML’s <img></img> tag? Web components are the answer.
Web components are custom elements that allow developers to extend HTML and encapsulate complex logic and styling into them. Web components can largely improve the productivity of front-end development, making them very popular among web developers.
We, as GIS web developers, can encapsulate complex web mapping libraries into simple web components, allowing them to be “plugged” into a larger website, regardless of the technology the site is based on (e.g., React, Angular, Vue, Wordpress, etc.).
Components for mapping applications are gaining popularity There are open-source libraries such as React Leaflet and @planet/maps as well as commercial APIs such as Google’s Maps JavaScript API and Esri’s ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript (web) components.
The technical portion of this talk will explore how to wrap popular web mapping libraries into web components and then include them in a website. We will use open-source mapping library for the custom web mapping application. We will share key steps and tips for how to write, test, and maintain web components as well as working with them in open-source and commercial content management systems.
Join us for this talk to learn about the power of web components and how to integrate them into your web mapping applications. We’ll also cover insights into the latest trends and technical details of creating and using web components.
Omar is a biotechnologist, geographer and computer scientist who works at Esri as an Engineer on the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript and Arcade expression language. Omar's main focus is to help develop and integrate modern web components.