[QGIS-Developer] QGIS Server and the Grants programme

[Jeremy Palmer]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 4:25 PM Richard Duivenvoorde <rdmailings at duif.net>
wrote:

> On 6/9/20 1:18 AM, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> > Something else to consider is whether technologies like WMS are
> > ultimately just "dead end" technologies now,
>
> Definitely not agreeing here :-)
>
> > and possibly we'd be
> > better off focusing on client side rendering of vector features from a
> > server (QGIS or other), and providing a library which can do
> > client-side rendering of vector tiles from QGIS symbology in as close
> > to 1:1 as possible...
>
> For full blown nice reference maps or aerials  WM(T)S is still the way
> to go. For simpler reference maps like Google, vector tiles will be...
>

XYZ/WMTS maps are certainly the way to go with raster products like aerials
or satellite data, which are for visualisation only. However, when it comes
to a national agency providing highly scalable vector map services, we have
concluded that using WMTS/WMS rasters has too many downsides. The key
benefits of vector tiles are:

* Faster generation of caches for serverless provision. Often you don't
need to generate vector tiles for each required client-side zoom
level/scale, and over-zooming is good enough. In some cases making raster
tiles with complex carto rules required massive computing resources and
timeframes. Even with cloud services, this is a key roadblock unless you
build very complex infrastructure architectures with auto-scaling. Even
then, it's costly to run and needs excellent expertise to set-up.
* Labels are nicely rendered client-side taking the device PPI into
account. For raster maps, generating maps for different DPIs becomes a
nightmare
* Being generally smaller which is essential for delivery to low bandwidth
devices
* Better user experience with seamless zooming and rotating of maps

I agree that raster maps can still produce nicer catro that vector tiles
(especially with combined raster/vector effects). However, raster web map
services have too many scalability issues, and in some cases, as mentioned
above, produce poor visual results or user experiences.  Of course, vector
WMS/WMTS still has it's a place for low volume websites.

In saying all of this, it would be great to get a seamless workflow from
data to published web maps. This needs to include having a style generator
(almost!) equivalent to QGIS desktop and a simple way to host and provide
maps at scale. I'm especially keen to see styling and export of vector
tiles in QGIS (it's almost there thanks to Martin and recent crowdfunding
initiative).

Cheers
Jeremy
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