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This looks nice, but my question is, why not LeafletJS or OL3? What are the unique features?

by orless 11y ago

iangilman 11y ago
All three are great projects! As @jrochkind1 pointed out, the key difference is that OpenSeadragon is oriented around non-map imagery whereas both Leaflet and OpenLayers are focused on maps. This leads to a number of subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences. One key point is that OpenSeadragon allows you to set the zoom level precisely where you want it without rounding to the nearest tile level. Leaflet is getting this feature (they call it fractional zoom) in 1.0, but it's not released yet and it's been missing for a long time. If you are presenting a painting, for instance, and you want the contents to fill the available space on the page, this feature is essential. Probably the biggest difference (as far as I'm aware) is that OpenSeadragon allows you to lay out and animate hundreds of high-resolution images in the same zoomable scene. For some examples of that in action, see: http://blog.iangilman.com/2015/05/openseadragon-20-forest-to-tree-zooming.html http://blog.iangilman.com/2015/05/openseadragon-20-forest-to...
punnerud 11y ago
I was thinking the same. And LeafletJS have HW-acceleration for iPhone and a lot of other features.
jrochkind1 11y ago
I actually wasn't previously familiar with Leaflet, but when I look at it's demo's now, I generally find it's UI not quite as good as OpenSeadragon's. Another commenter below agrees with me. It also looks like Leaflet may be focused on geographic data? OSD is not, it has no special geo features (which would be a problem if you need them), but is focused on _images_, which may end up giving it the sort of features (back-end and UI) and API suitable for people concered with high-res images as images, rather than maps. (Does Leaflet actually have facility for dealing with multi-resolution-level tiling? I would assume so, but it's not clear from a quick skim of the docs...) Or it could just be that there are multiple products with overlapping feature sets. I don't think OpenSeadragon is neccesarily _newer_ than Leaflet, as I think you imply. Looks like the first commit in Leaflet repo is Aug 2010; the first commit in OpenSeadragon is Nov 2011. I imagine both took a while to reach maturity. It's also worth pointing out that OpenSeadragon is the open source continutation of an originally proprietary Microsoft product. I'd say they were both developed relatively simulataneously, neither one was developed after a mature competitor already existed. It does seem from this thread that OpenSeadragon was news to many people who already knew about Leaflet, so I guess Leaflet is better known? A year ago when I was looking for an open JS tiling image viewer, I found OpenSeadragon, and somehow didn't even come accross leaflet!

This looks nice, but my question is, why not LeafletJS or OL3? What are the unique features?

by orless 11y ago

This looks nice, but my question is, why not LeafletJS or OL3? What are the unique features?

All three are great projects! As @jrochkind1 pointed out, the key difference is that OpenSeadragon is oriented around non-map imagery whereas both Leaflet and OpenLayers are focused on maps. This leads to a number of subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences. One key point is that OpenSeadragon allows you to set the zoom level precisely where you want it without rounding to the nearest tile level. Leaflet is getting this feature (they call it fractional zoom) in 1.0, but it's not released yet and it's been missing for a long time. If you are presenting a painting, for instance, and you want the contents to fill the available space on the page, this feature is essential. Probably the biggest difference (as far as I'm aware) is that OpenSeadragon allows you to lay out and animate hundreds of high-resolution images in the same zoomable scene. For some examples of that in action, see: http://blog.iangilman.com/2015/05/openseadragon-20-forest-to-tree-zooming.html http://blog.iangilman.com/2015/05/openseadragon-20-forest-to...

punnerud 11y ago

I was thinking the same. And LeafletJS have HW-acceleration for iPhone and a lot of other features.

jrochkind1 11y ago

I actually wasn't previously familiar with Leaflet, but when I look at it's demo's now, I generally find it's UI not quite as good as OpenSeadragon's. Another commenter below agrees with me. It also looks like Leaflet may be focused on geographic data? OSD is not, it has no special geo features (which would be a problem if you need them), but is focused on _images_, which may end up giving it the sort of features (back-end and UI) and API suitable for people concered with high-res images as images, rather than maps. (Does Leaflet actually have facility for dealing with multi-resolution-level tiling? I would assume so, but it's not clear from a quick skim of the docs...) Or it could just be that there are multiple products with overlapping feature sets. I don't think OpenSeadragon is neccesarily _newer_ than Leaflet, as I think you imply. Looks like the first commit in Leaflet repo is Aug 2010; the first commit in OpenSeadragon is Nov 2011. I imagine both took a while to reach maturity. It's also worth pointing out that OpenSeadragon is the open source continutation of an originally proprietary Microsoft product. I'd say they were both developed relatively simulataneously, neither one was developed after a mature competitor already existed. It does seem from this thread that OpenSeadragon was news to many people who already knew about Leaflet, so I guess Leaflet is better known? A year ago when I was looking for an open JS tiling image viewer, I found OpenSeadragon, and somehow didn't even come accross leaflet!