Practical GIS

Loading raw vector data

When it comes to web mapping and vector data, one of the most popular formats is GeoJSON. GeoJSON extends JSON, which is basically JavaScript's number one storage format. JSON is created to be concise while still able to represent almost every type in JavaScript. Therefore, we can save the states of web applications, for example, in order to resume them later. GeoJSON is also a concise format that can represent the basic geometry types and can be parsed by JavaScript easily. The only problem is that we have to load our GeoJSON files in our script. Although Leaflet knows how to handle GeoJSON objects, to load external content on the fly, we need to understand yet another concept--AJAX. On the other hand, there is a ...