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In recent years, Web GIS technology has been increasingly widely used, and Leaflet, as a lightweight open source JavaScript map library, has become the first choice for many Web map applications. Web applications written in PHP language can easily display map information and geographical location data on the Web. This article explains how to create a map application using PHP and Leaflet.
Before development, we need to prepare some development tools. First, you need to install the PHP development environment in advance. The code in this article is developed based on PHP7.3.12 version. Secondly, you need to download the Leaflet library. You can download the latest version of the library from the official website, or get the source code on GitHub. Finally, we need to choose a web framework to help us quickly build web services developed in PHP. In this article we choose to use a PHP framework: Lumen.
(1) Create a Lumen project
We can install Lumen through Composer. Enter the following command in the command line (provided Composer has been installed):
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/lumen map-app
This command will create a Lumen project named map-app in the current file directory.
(2) Install dependencies
Enter the project root directory and execute the following command to install the required dependencies:
composer install
(3) Integrate Leaflet
us Create a new folder (such as "public") in the root directory of the website and extract the downloaded Leaflet library file into this folder. Add the following code to the HTML page to introduce the Leaflet library:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/public/leaflet/leaflet.css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="/public/leaflet/leaflet.js"></script>
(4) Define routing
In the Lumen framework, we usually use routing to handle URL requests. Create a file named "web.php" in the "routes" directory and define different URLs corresponding to different processors. For example:
<?php $router->get('/', 'MapController@showMap'); ?>
We create a file named "MapController.php" in the root directory to handle different URL requests. This file contains the following method:
<?php namespace AppHttpControllers; use LaravelLumenRoutingController as BaseController; class MapController extends BaseController { public function showMap() { return view('map'); } } ?>
This method specifies that when the user accesses the "/" URL, the Blade template named "map.blade.php" will be displayed accordingly.
(5) Define Blade template
Blade is an extremely popular PHP template engine that allows us to write template files using a specific syntax format. In the “resources/views” directory, we create a template file named “map.blade.php”. The file contains the following code:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/public/leaflet/leaflet.css" /> <script src="/public/leaflet/leaflet.js"></script> <style> #mapid { height: 600px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="mapid"></div> <script> var mymap = L.map('mapid').setView([51.505, -0.09], 13); L.tileLayer('https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/{id}/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}?access_token={accessToken}', { attribution: 'Map data © <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors, ' + '<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC-BY-SA</a>, ' + 'Imagery © <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/">Mapbox</a>', maxZoom: 18, id: 'mapbox/streets-v11', tileSize: 512, zoomOffset: -1, accessToken: 'change me' }).addTo(mymap); </script> </body> </html>
This template file defines the initial position and zoom level of a map, using the street map style provided by Mapbox, in which the "accessToken" needs to be filled in with your own Mapbox Access Token. In the template file, we also need to reference the Leaflet library file introduced in the “public” folder.
(6) Run the application
Now you can enter the following command in the command line to start the Web server:
php -S localhost:8000 -t public
Visit "http://localhost: 8000” to see the web page showing the map.
Through the study of this article, readers have learned how to use PHP and Leaflet to create map applications. We learned how to use the Lumen framework, how to import the Leaflet library, how to create maps in templates, and how to start a web server. Readers can use this article to gain a preliminary understanding of how to use PHP to create Web GIS applications.
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