[postgis-devel] ST_AsGeobuf

[Paul Norman]

On 9/12/2016 12:59 AM, Björn Harrtell wrote:
> Hi devs,
>
> I've been working on a new output format function called ST_AsGeobuf 
> these last months. Its purpose is to serialize full query output into 
> the binary format Geobuf containing both geometry and attributes. The 
> implementation is tracked by:
>
> https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/3599
> https://git.osgeo.org/gogs/postgis/postgis/pulls/4 or alternatively 
> https://github.com/bjornharrtell/postgis/tree/asgeobuf5
>
> Geobuf is a binary format specified by Mapbox that can represent 
> similar data and structure as GeoJSON but is more compact and is 
> faster encode and decode. You can read more about Geobuf at 
> https://github.com/mapbox/geobuf which also serves as the reference 
> implementation to decode at a browser client side.
>
> Geobuf is in turn based on Googles protobuf standard which I think is 
> similar to a binary XML. My implementation uses the general purpose 
> library protobuf-c to simplify the encoding.
>
> I hope to be able use this work as a base to also implement support 
> for vector tiles as specified by Mapbox which is also based on protobuf.
>
> I think the implementation is ready for review and testing. If you 
> have any interest in Geobuf or vector tiles output support I'd 
> appreciate review and/or test result feedback.
>

The MapBox geobuf page states "Note that the encoding schema is not 
stable yet". Is it premature to put this in PostGIS?