4 ms·

7+ years to be exact. It's unfair to call Leaflet dead — it's still quite actively maintained, gets regular releases and has a huge community of both users and

7+ years to be exact. It's unfair to call Leaflet dead — it's still quite actively maintained, gets regular releases and has a huge community of both users and contributors, and Mapbox have always been supportive of me spending time on it during work hours. What someone can see as less development activity is simply a sign of a mature product that doesn't need many new features and changes to remain useful — focusing on the core basic mapping needs has always been its goal, and it continues to adhere to it.

karussell 6y ago
Thanks for replying and all your amazing work :) ! What I see or meant as a sign of "dead" is that there will be no new features that Mapbox GL JS has but that are critical for future applications. Like proper or inbuilt vector tiles support.
- trynewideas 6y ago
  > Like proper or inbuilt vector tiles support I thought one of the primary features of Leaflet was its modularity. Would built-in vector tile support be an anti-pattern?
- Widdershin 6y ago
  Reading this comment makes me a bit sad because I wrote a really good incremental tile based renderer for leaflet that could easily be adapted for vector tiles. Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one I'd encourage you to reach out and ask for permission to release it. In the past I've found that the sticking point was usually copyright assignment rather than the release per-se (with a side helping of worry over hidden IP violations), so get them to release a tarball under a permissive license like MIT/BSD, even if your intention is to immediately fork it. Basically, if you can manage to do the work for them so they can just rubber stamp the release, you can probably get it done.

karussell 6y ago

Thanks for replying and all your amazing work :) ! What I see or meant as a sign of "dead" is that there will be no new features that Mapbox GL JS has but that are critical for future applications. Like proper or inbuilt vector tiles support.

trynewideas 6y ago
> Like proper or inbuilt vector tiles support I thought one of the primary features of Leaflet was its modularity. Would built-in vector tile support be an anti-pattern?
Widdershin 6y ago
Reading this comment makes me a bit sad because I wrote a really good incremental tile based renderer for leaflet that could easily be adapted for vector tiles. Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Unfortunately that whole business unit got canned and the code is now gathering dust somewhere :/ would have loved to open source that one I'd encourage you to reach out and ask for permission to release it. In the past I've found that the sticking point was usually copyright assignment rather than the release per-se (with a side helping of worry over hidden IP violations), so get them to release a tarball under a permissive license like MIT/BSD, even if your intention is to immediately fork it. Basically, if you can manage to do the work for them so they can just rubber stamp the release, you can probably get it done.