[OpenLayers-Dev] TMS vector tiles

[Luca Morandini]

G'day everyone,

I know this has been proposed before, and taht there are vector tiles available in 
OL3, but... we (the AURIN project) cannot wait for OL3, and we do need vector 
tiles now. I was tasked with sounding out the feasibility of it, hence bear me 
while I state my case.

I have developed a nice vector tile server in Node.js, backed by PostGIS and using 
CouchDB as cache; the output formats are GeoJSON and TopoJSON.

To use the tiles produced by said server I need, of course, a client, possibly one 
merging tiled polygons into the original ones when the format is TopoJSON (the end 
result is a seamless layer).

I developed such a client with Leaflet, backed by JSTS and D3 for the merging bit, 
and it works rather well; I tried to do the same with OL3 Beta4, but failed... 
hence I would like to give OL2 a try (our current UI is built on OL2).

Having said that, I would like to know what's the state of the art related to TMS 
vector tiles in OL2.
As far as I know, there was an attempt (see links below), but it did not make it 
to the code base: does anyone know if there had been a blocker during the 
implementation of this capability ?

In addition, I would love to here comments and hints on how to implement this 
TMS-TopoJSON-cum-merging layer type.

http://openlayerstools.sourceforge.net/src/Strategy_TFS.js
http://openlayerstools.sourceforge.net/examples/TFS.html

Regards,

Luca Morandini
Data Architect - AURIN project
Melbourne eResearch Group
Department of Computing and Information Systems
University of Melbourne