Annoucement: Esri Leaflet project status and ongoing maintenance

[patrickarlt]

With Esri UC winding down I thought it would be a good time to clarify the nature of Esri Leaflet and the future of the project. Esri Leaflet has its 6th anniversary in May. @jgravois has been managing and continuing to work on guide Esri Leaflet since 2016 and doing a fantastic job including finishing the 2.0.0 release in 2016 and all subsequent releases that included many new and first time contributors. As some has heard @jgravois recently departed Esri for an exciting new position and we all wish him the best.

As a result of this @gavinr and I are going to take over Esri Leaflet and continue to maintain it to the best of our abilities and I wanted to take some time to give an update on the current state of the Esri Leaflet project:

1. Esri Leaflet has an extremely solid API that is very productive for a wide variety of use cases.
2. Esri Leaflet is still the most starred repo from Esri and has the most external non-Esri contributors. Most of the credit for this goes to @jgravois and @gavinr and I hope we can continue to involve the community in this project.
3. @gavinr and I are committed to maintaining Esri Leaflet to the best of our abilities. This means you can expect:
   • Continued bug fixes and improvements to all of the core library and existing plugins
   • Continued improvements to samples and documentation
   • Continued compatibility updates as both Leaflet, browsers and the ArcGIS Platform evolve.
4. However due to our responsibilities on our current teams we do not have time to continue to develop new features or plugins or perform major rewrites of existing features.

In order to better communicate this in the coming weeks @gavinr and I will be:

1. ~Spinning up a channel for Esri Leaflet on Spatial Community.~ This has been created please join the Spatial Community and then access the #esri-leaflet channel
2. Reviewing all open issues across all plugins and try to start moving forward on resolutions.
3. Dividing up the plugins page into official plugins and plugins from community members to be clearer about what we are supporting.
4. ~Officially deprecate the experimental vector tiles plugin. This was originally created as a proof-of-concept and we strongly recommend against using it in production applications. Supporting vector tiles in Esri Leaflet would be a major undertaking. (Updated info on this)~ UPDATE: The vector tiles plugin v3 was released recently and is a recommended and viable solution if you want to use vector tile basemaps or other custom vector tile layers.
5. Clearly messaging what is ongoing development (core libraries and plugins) and what is not (vector tiles, community plugins) in Readmes and the documentation website.

[jgravois]

to say that I have a soft spot for Esri Leaflet would be an understatement. it was the first open source project I really cut my teeth on and gave me the experience and confidence to branch out into lots of others.

my gratitude to @patrickarlt for being such an approachable mentor and to all the other folks I learned from along the way.

another active repository that could use a few more stewards is https://github.com/esri/terraformer. whether you're an Esri employee interested in JavaScript and Open Source or just a nerd out in the 🌏 with love in your ❤️ for GeoJSON, I am more than happy to repay the favor to @patrickarlt and mentor new contributors, so please don't be shy.

[jwasilgeo]

I'm happy to help out in any way. I'd like to get back into supporting the esri-leaflet related repos again.

[jgravois]

very glad to hear it @jwasilgeo. :cupid:

all, you can find more specifics about projects that need shepherds here: https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet-doc/issues/234#issuecomment-516018875

[jwasilgeo]

Hey, thanks for helping me get involved in all this in the first place, @jgravois!

[robertd]

I'm ready to lend a hand if needed too.

[elake2018]

With ESRI development on their 3.x JS API ending in 2020. Does this work for 4.x? Is there a plan for it to work for 4.x?

[joelhickok]

With ESRI development on their 3.x JS API ending in 2020. Does this work for 4.x? Is there a plan for it to work for 4.x?

@elake2018 - This is a replacement for the ArcGIS JS API. It is not designed to work with either 3.x or 4.x but replaces them for those using Leaflet as an alternative.

[jwasilgeo]

For those still looking for more info on the changes introduced earlier this year, we just refreshed the docs pages and changelogs to reflect what's new at esri-leaflet v3.

Live examples and API docs:

• ~https://esri.github.io/esri-leaflet~ retired

Related repo changelogs:

• https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
• https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet-geocoder/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
• https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet-vector/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

And check out the ArcGIS for Developers pages focusing on esri-leaflet:

• https://developers.arcgis.com/esri-leaflet/