Tools I recommend for building Geospatial Web Applications

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Being a freelance WebGIS developer, it is very frequent for me to decide what tools I’ll need for my next project. Now after a few years of experience, this decision has become a bit easier because of prior knowledge and I thought I should share it with all those who want to build a Geospatial Webapp.

Before you read further, I want you to know two things:

1. All the tools that I’ll discuss in this blog are free and/or opensource, won’t talk about paid and/or proprietary tools.
2. These tools can be used to build a small to medium scale web application. They will be able to work at scale with a lot of users but might or might not be able to handle very large geospatial datasets. If you want to handle large geospatial datasets in your web app, you might want to read “How to work with BIG Geospatial Data”.

Frontend

The most important part of a Geospatial web Application is the frontend where all the data is visualized which is the main focus in about 90% of geospatial web apps.

Leaflet

For the frontend, my first priority is Leaflet which is a lightweight javascript library…