Clustering / Caching / Styling / Providers / Performance

[aytunch]

Hi,
First of all thanks for this awesome initiative @josxha
I am long time flutter_map user. The biggest reason was the ability to have custom widgets as markers and clustering support.
I see this library has support for that using widgets layer which is cool. I haven't yet played with it.
Before diving deep in to this package, i would like to ask some questions. I went through the documentation site and if there are some things I missed there, i apologize beforehands.

• This package handles all functionality within itself right? no plugins?
• Do we get clustering support for widgets layer? (custom widget marker) how?
• Is there a similar functionality to popup_markers?
• What is a Symbol Layer? What is a Annotation Layer? these are not too clear from documentation.
• Is the caching we have now only on memory? or is it persistent until app uninstall? what is the cutoff date/size? ie 30days? 100MB? can we set it?
• Can we download and manipulate json styles to have less features of the map in real time? Are all style entities supported? is it limited with text style and color theming? Does having less details result in better performance?
• Can we use vector tile sets from any provider? maplibre/mapbox/stadia/OSM/etc. For pricing, do we need to check their vector api row? in flutter_map documentation they are listed and it is extremely useful.
• Generally can we expect better graphics and battery performance compared to flutter_map? what happens with 10s of thousands of custom widget markers?
• In the example web app, I saw Tilting capability which is awesome. Is this applicable to all vector maps? is there a limitation?

[aytunch]

I would like to add some of the answers I found from months ago. I am not sure if they are upto date though

Performance:
In general we can expect performance that matches the official google maps package and the official mapbox package. All those packages use a native renderer written in C++. This package in particular makes use of some modern tweaks like interop with java through JNI and modern dart features. But its very hard to compare performance between them without running proper benchmarks.

However, it is certain that it has much better performance than vector tiles on flutter_map and even flutter_map in general. flutter_map and vector_map_tiles is 100% written in dart. This is great to support all plaforms but suffers in performance.

Providers:
Not limited to MapBox. Here is the list: https://github.com/maplibre/awesome-maplibre?tab=readme-ov-file#maptile-providers

[josxha]

Hi @aytunch, it seems like you already did some good research. Let me still answer your questions. (:

This package handles all functionality within itself right? no plugins?

Yes, the idea is to provide a mostly complete mapping experience.

Do we get clustering support for widgets layer? (custom widget marker) how?

The SymbolStyleLayer has this functionality but the WidgetLayer currently does not. The design idea is that you would use the more performant Markers/Symbols instead of widgets for better performance if you neet to display lots and lots of markers.
But in theory you should be able to use the flutter_map_maplibre package and use most flutter_map plugins on the maplibre map (like the cluster plugin). I haven't tested this myself, though.

Is there a similar functionality to popup_markers?

No, currently not. There is an open pull request that adds annotations that should enable popups as well.

What is a Symbol Layer? What is a Annotation Layer? these are not too clear from documentation.

A symbol layer gets added directly to your vector map style and gets rendered together with the map instead of inside flutter.
https://maplibre.org/maplibre-style-spec/layers/#symbol
Annotation layers are an abstraction of style layers and provide an flutter like declarative way to implement markers, polylines, circles and so on. For those you can use for example setState(() {}) just like you would normally do. Symbol layers need to be manually added, modified or removed using the StyleController.

Is the caching we have now only on memory? or is it persistent until app uninstall? what is the cutoff date/size? ie 30days? 100MB? can we set it?

The caching should be according to the response headers provided by the tile server. There are some options to configure it on Android via the OfflineManager. Web only uses the caching that comes with the browser.

Can we download and manipulate json styles to have less features of the map in real time? Are all style entities supported? is it limited with text style and color theming? Does having less details result in better performance?

Yes it's possible to enable or disable map layers at runtime. All style entities are supported that are supported by the maplibre SDKs and following the maplibre style spec. Many Mapbox features work as well but not all, especially newer features.

Can we use vector tile sets from any provider? maplibre/mapbox/stadia/OSM/etc. For pricing, do we need to check their vector api row?

Yes, the package does not limit you to any tile provider, you can even host your own tiles. I assume pricing would be the vector tiles row, if that does not exist probably the vector api yes.

Generally can we expect better graphics and battery performance compared to flutter_map? what happens with 10s of thousands of custom widget markers?

When using functionality like vector maps, maplibre should be better. When using lots and lots of widgets on top of the map, flutter_map will have better performance because its MarkerLayer culls widgets that are not visible to the user.

In the example web app, I saw Tilting capability which is awesome. Is this applicable to all vector maps? is there a limitation?

Yes, currently up to 60° on Android and iOS and up to 85° on web.