Support pmtiles as layer

[rob.j.nickerson@…]

It would be good if support was added for ​pmtiles.

[stoecker]

It seems extremely easy to setup with local tile delivery. Why should JOSM support it?

[rob.j.nickerson@…]

Why should JOSM support it?

It provides an easy option for users to create a set of tiles and easily host them (e.g. if less than 1GB then hosting on GitHub-pages is possible). The alternative is that you need to set up a tile server (not so easy for novices like me) or generate all the tiles and then wait ages to get them uploaded to a hosting provider and incur their fees for hosting them. PMtiles look like an alternative and I already have a use case in mind if OSM editors start to support them.

Thanks,
Rob

[stoecker]

JOSM has already a plugin for MBTiles. ​https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MBTiles

I suggest to open a request for the MBTiles plugin ​https://github.com/iandees/josm-mbtiles/ to also support pmtiles when mbtiles doesn't fulfill your needs. That would be the logical place to support a similar format.

[anonymous]

I thought MVT support was now built in to JOSM and not a plugin.

[stoecker]

Replying to anonym:

I thought MVT support was now built in to JOSM and not a plugin.

That's relevant here why? PMTiles is a raster format.

[amanda@…]

pmtiles, like mbtiles, is a container format. It can contain raster tile data, or MVT vector tiles.

I, too, would like to see pmtiles support, it can be useful way for someone to share & use local tilesets,
The pmtiles format is very different from mbtiles, and much simplier.

[taylor.smock]

In 36112/osm:

Fix #22691: Add PMTiles plugin

This should be fairly easy to port to JOSM core, if there is demand from tile
providers to use PMTiles.

Caveats: There is a few classes copied from JOSM core, since I needed some things
to be visible that were not, and in some instances, the AbstractClass had some
methods that should be hoisted to the interface -- the AbstractClass in question
was written prior to our move to Java 8.

[taylor.smock]

There are a few things I'd like to change in JOSM core. I'll open a separate ticket for those changes to give people a chance to give feedback. It pretty much boils down to expanding visibility of a few methods and moving some method implementations into the respective interface as a default method. It looks like a lot of that was done prior to 2016, which is what the JOSM wikidata page has as the year we moved to Java 8.

[taylor.smock]

In 36113/osm:

See #22691 (dist): Add PMTiles plugin

[rob.j.nickerson@…]

Ah, amazing. Thank you. How does it work though? Do I need to update to the latest version of JOSM as well as installing the plugin? Where in the UI do I add pmtiles layers?

[taylor.smock]

Do I need to update to the latest version of JOSM as well as installing the plugin?

You shouldn't need to update to the latest version of JOSM. I didn't do any code changes to JOSM for the plugin; there are some that I want to do, since I'm duplicating code in it right now.

You do need to be running JOSM with Java 17 or later. If you see a nag window to update, please update. If you ignored it at some point in time (and told it to never nag you again), you should see JOSM soon will no longer support this version of Java, you should update to version 17 or better! on the start screen.

You likely need to click on either Download list or Update plugins (which downloads a new copy of the plugin list) in JOSM Preferences -> Plugins.

Where in the UI do I add pmtiles layers?

It depends; where is the PMTiles file located?

If it is located on a remote server, use File -> Open Location. If it is located on your computer, use File -> Open....

There are a couple of rough edges that I still need to work on/find, but it works.