deck.gl is designed to make visualization of large data sets simple. It enables users to quickly get impressive visual results with limited effort through composition of existing layers, while offering a complete architecture for packaging advanced WebGL based visualizations as reusable JavaScript layers.
The basic idea of using deck.gl is to render a stack of visual overlays, usually (but not always) over maps.
To make this simple concept work, deck.gl handles a number of challenges:
- Handling of large data sets and performant updates
- Interactive event handling such as picking
- Cartographic projections and integration with underlying map
- A catalog of proven, well-tested layers
- Easy to create new layers or customize existing layers
deck.gl has been developed in parallel with a number of companion modules:
- luma.gl - A general purpose WebGL library designed to be interoperable both with the raw WebGL API and (as far as possible) with other WebGL libraries. In particular, luma.gl does not claim ownership of the WebGL context, and can work with any supplied context, including contexts created by the application or other WebGL libraries.
- react-map-gl - A React wrapper around Mapbox GL which works seamlessly with deck.gl.
In addition, in the future we plan to publish additional deck.gl layers and layer packages as separate modules.
How you approach learning deck.gl will depend on your previous knowledge and how you want to use it.
Learning the layer props, and reading the basic articles in the deck.gl documentation should of course be the first step. But where to go after that?
deck.gl is designed according to the principles of the Reactive Programming Model.
The key to writing good, performant deck.gl applications and layers lies in understanding how to minimize updates and redundant calculations.
It is important to understand the implications of the shallow equality comparisons deck.gl performs on layer properties, and how this implies that new data and property objects must only be created when the underlying data actually changes in order to prevent unnecessary updates.
There is an impressive amount of information (documentation, blog posts, educational videos, etc.) on the reactive programming paradigm in relation to modern web frameworks such as React, Flux and Redux. Where to start depends mostly on your application architecture choices.
This is only needed if you want to create custom layers in deck.gl. Note that while trying out a new ambitious rendering approach for a new layer will likely require deeper knowledge, it is often possible to modify or extend existing deck.gl layers (including modifying the shader code) with a surprisingly limited amount of WebGL knowledge.
There are many web resources for learning WebGL.