Leaflet Maps Library

Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for building mobile-friendly interactive maps, created by Volodymyr Agafonkin in 2011. The library weighs approximately forty-two kilobytes minified, yet provides the core features needed for most web mapping applications including tile layers from providers like OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, and Esri, vector layers for markers, polylines, polygons, circles, and rectangles, popups for displaying information at locations, and zoom, pan, and layer controls. Leaflet supports GeoJSON for importing geographic data, image overlays for aligning images to map coordinates, and video overlays for embedding video content on maps. The event system handles user interactions including click, hover, drag, zoom, and move events with precise coordinate conversion between screen pixels and geographic coordinates. The plugin ecosystem extends Leaflet with hundreds of community plugins for clustering markers, heatmaps, routing, drawing, geocoding, fullscreen, minimap, and marker animation. Leaflet works across all major desktop and mobile browsers, supporting touch gestures including pinch-to-zoom, tap, and long-press, with retina display support for crisp tile rendering. The library is used by major websites including Flickr, Foursquare, Craigslist, The Washington Post, and GitHub for their mapping needs, and serves as the foundation for higher-level mapping frameworks.