Esri Leaflet 1.0.0 Announcement

It's what all of you have been waiting for, a stable release of Esri Leaflet! Many, many people I have talked to have loved using Esri Leaflet for building custom apps on top of or with ArcGIS Services and for a long time I delayed the release of a full 1.0.0 version to wait for the Leaflet 1.0 release. However after talking to several developers who told me.

I would love to use Esri Leaflet but I can't use any beta software

I realized that forcing everyone to upgrade to Leaflet 1.0 just to get a stable release of Esri Leaflet wasn't something that a lot of people would want to, need to, or have time to, do. The reality of this set in spurred by the upcoming Leaflet 1.0 release and Vladimir (@mourner) proclaiming:

The latest stable version, 0.7.3, is already perfect

He isn't lying, Leaflet 0.7.3 was released over a year ago and has been stable and extremely bug free. It made sense to provide a stable release of Esri Leaflet for use with Leaflet 0.7.3 So the last few days John Gravois (@jgravois) and I have started to wrap up the last sets of changes to release Esri Leaflet 1.0. Soon we will be releasing 1.0 versions of:

• esri-leaflet
• esri-leaflet-geocoder
• esri-leaflet-heatmap-feature-layer
• esri-leaflet-clustered-feature-layer
• esri-leaflet-gp

We will follow up the initial release of these plugins with 1.0.0 releases for other plugins like renderers later.

Esri Leaflet and Leaflet 1.0

When Leaflet 1.0 is released we will most likely release either a 2.0 beta 1 or a 2.0.0 release of Esri Leaflet. Future releases of Esri Leaflet will be fully compliant with SemVer:

• 1.0.X - stable and compatible with Leaflet 0.7.3, bug fixes only
• 2.X.X - stable and compatible with Leaflet 1.X.X, new features and bug fixes

This means that you can use a stable release of Esri Leaflet without having to wait for Leaflet 1.0 and all your other plugins to release Leaflet 1.0 compatible versions.

Notes about Esri Leaflet 1.0

There are breaking changes in Esri Leaflet 1.0 please read the through the changes carefully and make adaptations to your code. In general you will probably need to make changes if you:

• Are using L.esri.Services.FeatureLayer - this has been renamed to L.esri.Services.FeatureLayerService
• Are using thing.query(), thing.identify() or thing.find() or the Find, Query or Identify tasks. Callbacks now can be run multiple times to allow for handling of authentication errors. Make sure you either return after handling errors and/or check for a successful response before using it. Never assume a response succeed.

// assume layer requires a token
layer.query().run(function(error, features){
  if(error) {
    // handle the error here
    return; // return early to stop execution of the callback
 }
 // do something with features
});

Whats coming in Esri Leaflet 2.0?

The major change will be relying solely on Leaflet 1.0 which offers quite a few benefits:

• Performance increases to event propagation, lat lng creation, ect...
• Memory usage reductions for popups and other things
• New features like fractional zoom levels and new animation engine
• Better tools for plugin authors like a new Layer base class, options merging and event propagation
• Removal of hardcoded projections hacks
• A new map.createPanesystem for managing layer ordering
• A new Renderer interface for handling vector drawing

Overall this means that apps will fun faster, smoother and better while enabling a few excellent new features:

• Vector tiles with fractional zoom levels
• Substantially better support for non-mercator spatial references
• Fine grain control of layer ordering
• Handling of larger numbers of vector shapes

All of these have been features that are of great interest to Esri Leaflet users that are only really possible with Leaflet 1.0, so look for Esri Leaflet to take advantage of them soon!