Leaflet Map with UTFGrid and PHP Served Mbtiles

Final Demo: Largest Cities on Leaflet Map

It has been fun visualizing all kinds of data with D3, Raphael, OpenLayers, MapBox, PolyMaps, and ModestMaps, but now I really want to dig into Leaflet and UTFGrid. UTFGrid is a concept created by MapBox to improve the performance of map interaction across browsers when you are dealing with large amounts of vector data. In more detail, UTFGrid rasterizes polygons and points in JSON as a grid of text characters to enable fast lookups. It is as amazing and simple as it sounds and Leaflet has a UTFGrid plugin among its many great plugins.

Today I will show a basic example of Leaflet, demonstrate how to use MapBox maps in Leaflet, create a map out of city data in TileMill with UTFGrid, serve those map image tiles with PHP from my own server, and put it all together to create a demo of a fast dynamic Leaflet map with top 1,000 cities by population.
Read more