Using Our Tile Server with Leaflet

Written 12/02/17

We have developed our own high performance tile server which we use to serve the tiles for our map server. It was designed specifically for serving tiles created on the OSGB 36 aka EPSG:27700 datum which you may know better as the Ordnance Survey National Grid.

When we first developed it we were using the OpenLayers 2 JavaScript library, and indeed we still are, so it was designed work with that but since we have started selling our tile server service to other customers we've had requests to use our tile server with the Leaflet JavaScript library instead.

Leaflet logo If you've not come across it before Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps and it weighs in at just about 38KB of JavaScript compared to 723KB for OpenLayers 2.

There is a catch to this of course: it's not as feature rich and flexible as OpenLayers but it is simple to create applications in and, especially for mobile use where the mobile data speed may be slow and users are often paying by the byte, there's a strong case for using it when you can do without the extra power OpenLayers gives you.

With that in mind today we launched our extension to Leaflet which will allow you to add tiles from our map server as a layer on your Leaflet map so if that's something you might like to use then please get in touch for a quote.

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