Lonboard with tiled data about lonboard HOT 4 OPEN

We should test again with the new AbortSignal support: manzt/anywidget#540

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@kylebarron Do you see a role for PMTiles here? We've been very happy with PMTiles for leaflet-based maps (e.g. via folium-pmtiles, leafmap, rendered with maplibre) but from what I can tell it's not supported in deck.gl.

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deck.gl supports any tiled data source, as long as you provide a callback for how to load each tile. So for a JS application using deck.gl, supporting PMTiles is not too hard.

The harder part is styling the data, especially depending on the trajectory of the data, and specifically whether data goes straight from server to browser or whether it passes through Python.

The part about pydeck that I dislike the most is that it featured a custom, hacky string domain-specific language for how to run JS code to style the input data. As I write in the internals doc, one of the main goals of lonboard is to support data scientists working with data already in Python. The map's styling could then be done in Python rather than in JS.

For comparison, folium-pmtiles, which uses protomaps-leaflet, looks like it implements the Mapbox Style Specification, so it has a way to apply a declarative JSON style to the data fully on the client.

This issue was originally focused on dynamically tiling data from Python to be sent to JS for visualization, but where the data already lived in Python, or at least was being proxied through Python. We could also implement a PMTiles proxy that would load tiles through Python, and give users the option of a callback to generate usual python layers

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Awesome, thanks! Definitely agree with the sentiments here, 💯 on supporting data scientists who are already in Python and would like to do styling from python and not JS. Like you say, this mostly works pretty well in folium-pmtiles because we can provide this information in JSON / dict format, though I could wish that the support for deriving styles from the data attributes was more pythonic than {"fill-color": ["get", "color"]) . otoh, that is easy to wrap around, and mapbox / maplibre styling is very flexible and well documented.

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