Gather options for geographical maps to show on UI

[moliver28]

I wanted to document some of the desk research I did over the last week. I attempted to look for lightweight, open-source map svelte libraries. Here's what I found..

@jsvine @mrosadio
TL,DR; I found madewithsvelte.com which had a few decent options which include maplibre, and mapbox (which does have some pricing at certain usages). The best options I found were Jvectormap, datamaps, and svelte-geo. This is in addition to the popular choice of Leaflet, which has many options.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

JVectorMaps

JVectorMaps has a template that looks very similar to what we may want for this work. The code can be found here. There are also labels with information that appear on hover. This looks to be a free license

There is also a drill-down US map that is very close to what we'd want, I think.

DataMaps

DataMaps has some templates which feature labels on states and zoom functionality (which doesn't work on my browser so I'd need to try more to test). There are also labels with information which show on hover.

Svelte-geo

Svelte-geo had some decent options that seemed ultra-lightweight, but I'm unsure if there's support for pings or markers on the map, which we would need. There was a nice fly-out that has information when clicked on a region.

Maplibre

Maplibre has many option, and I think there cluster and popup one is closest to what we'd use. There was also a cluster map which was pretty neat.

Leaflet

Leaflet has many many options, but I went through the base-map providers and thought Mierune looked similar to what we'd want. There was also tilelayer.Swiss which looked okay. I found a cool link to go through tons of other provider demos easily. Lastly, there was a Unovis that seems to be a fork of Leaflet and has a map that seems appropriate, shown below.

Other

Openlayers has tons of options, but I didn't really see any that would work for our data.
datawrapper was a decent option, but after looking at their pricing page, it seems like the maps would have to be .png on the free license.

[jsvine]

Thank you, @moliver28! Very helpful. Maplibre and Leaflet both seem like good options, particularly since they allow for basemaps, which seems like a useful feature for this use-case.

[moliver28]

How did you want to move forward @mrosadio ? This issue can be closed, and we can move the rest of the work into #5, but I'm a little new to collaborating on code that's on GitHub so I wasn't sure how how you wanted to handle that. But, I'm flexible with anything!