CartoDB is a joy to work with
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
I integrated CartoDB into a Java Spring MVC web application to support complex visualizations of geographic networking data. CartoDB allowed me to create maps of network nodes colored by various state information to help identify and diagnose trouble areas. Once I got it set up it was very simple to add visualizations of additional metrics so we ended up building out map styles for all sorts of information and finding interesting and unexpected patterns.
Pros
- It is amazing at allowing control of the visualizations. It takes a little bit to get used to but the combination of full SQL queries and CSS-like styling is very powerful.
- The services are built on a robust stack of open source software. I was able to build a standalone instance of CartoDB relatively easily (after some research and trial and error).
- Server side map rendering is key for handling large data sets. The way the images are returned makes them very easy to catch in an HTTP cache to minimize the hits to the server. The interactivity that CartoDB has built in makes this completely transparent to the end user, they can click on parts of the static images and be presented with popups or change map styles. It's a very clever implementation.
Cons
- I adopted CartoDB just before a major API change. We chose to make a standalone instance and unfortunately this API change meant we would have to do a lot of work to move to a newer version. Perhaps just a hazard of being an early adopter.
- It would be extremely helpful if CartoDB provided a Java library for interacting with the service. The visualization definition (setting up the map, styles, etc) is all handled by sending a JSON structure to the service. In my application I had to manually create a large number of Java classes mapping the expected JSON format so that we could construct the visualization from our code. This was a fair amount of work and was invalidated when CartoDB later changed their visualization structure. This could be mitigated by providing client libraries for common languages.
Likelihood to Recommend
I have not seen a better mapping tool than CartoDB. You get the familiarity of Google Maps with arbitrarily complex geographic data visualization on top. CartoDB excels at large data sets where Google Maps API completely chokes when attempting to handle more than ~1000 data points. I was able to plot 500,000 points on a map with reasonable speed and able to perform complex aggregations to display boundaries of areas containing certain types of data, intersections of those sections, and more.
BC
Brandon Christensen
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Solekai Systems (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
3 years of experience