pixelcooker

A few months ago, I created a video tutorial about how to serve raster or imagery tiles using Github  using TMS/XYZ Tile Serving protocol. The tiles can be consumed by a web gis app either as a base  map or operational layer. Although the workflow is proven to be working for general cases, the tiles  displaying and loading speed are quite mediocre compared to API-based serving such as WMS,  WMTS, or ArcGIS Services.  Now, there is one protocol called PMTiles that can also provide similar functionality with additional  features and better loading/displaying performance. PMTiles in many ways is similar to Mapbox  MBTiles format (the tiles are packed into a single file), or ArcGIS's TPK Package. However, PMTiles  can be served directly using a common HTTP query (not like MBtiles or TPK which must be deployed into API Services to be able to be consumed by a webgis client). So, if you want to use Github as your host, you won't find an uploading problem...

There are two types of basemaps. Raster tile basemap and vector tile basemap. The raster tile basemap is pre-rendered, stored on the server, and displayed unchanged by the client. The World Imagery basemap is a good example of a raster tile basemap and an example of a basemap that cannot be displayed as a vector tile basemap. The Vector Tile Basemap references a set of web-accessible vector tile data (points, lines, and polygons) and the appropriate style for drawing those tiles. Vector tile basemaps are used for non-image content. Vector tile layers can be adapted to the resolution of your display device and can be redesigned for multiple uses. Vector tile basemap technology now is supported in latest GIS Software such as ArcGIS Pro and QGIS. There are few vector tile format that have been developed by various company or agency. For example, Mapbox have developed MBtiles and MVT as Vector Tile format, ESRI and Google use Protocol Buffer Format (PBF) for its vector t...