09-11, 15:00–15:30 (America/Chicago), Grand G
We’ll explore creating an open-source React-based component library to streamline geospatial web application development at Sparkgeo. We’ll discuss the basic concepts, technical implementation, challenges and benefits to building a component library used across different geospatial projects.
Most geospatial web applications share similar user interface needs like layer controls, legends, maps and timeline interactions. Instead of building these from scratch every time, we’re working on a library of pre-built, configurable components that can easily be used in a range of projects.
We’ll discuss the technical implementation with React’s component-based architecture, and some of the tools used for efficient management and testing. We’re working to make the library map framework agnostic, enabling compatibility with different mapping libraries like Maplibre, OpenLayers and Deck.gl.
Building a useful geospatial component library presents some challenges. We’ll cover aspects like establishing development standards, enabling configurability and custom styling to meet project requirements, and managing an open-source project. We believe that engaging the community and encouraging collaboration will help overcome some of these hurdles.
While challenging to build, a geospatial component library will support our current and future projects, as well the wider community by offering large time and cost savings, reducing code redundancy, enabling quicker prototyping and facilitating development of robust web map applications. Ultimately, this project aims to provide a valuable resource for efficient and consistent geospatial web development.
