A note for software archeologists - working with Leaflet 0.77 and vector tiles in production

[do-me]

For anyone reading this: chances are that for some reason you're still using Leaflet 0.77 and looking for a more performant way to display lots of points or similar in a piece of legacy software (of course you considered upgrading to Leaflet >1 but you can't for some reason).

We were facing this exact challenge. This plugin is the only one we found that actually works! We do use it in a piece of legacy software with Postgres and a tile server plugin and are quite happy with it after all. It's performant and the only issues we have with it are the below:

• On the edges of the tiles, the displayed elements (e.g. points) are cut off. But it's a minor inconvenience and only happens when the geometries are bigger than the tiles or right on the edges.

• When the IDs in the data are not unique, tooltips behave weirdly. Just keep this in mind.
• You need to use the custom style syntax and obviously cannot use modern JSON-based vector tile styles like this

Maybe this note will save someone some time and energy at some point. If so, feel free to let me know about your project 😄

Update 04/2025: I patched protomaps-leaflet for Leaflet versions <1.0, see here: https://github.com/do-me/leaflet-0.8-dev-protomaps. Draws on canvas but without any bugs!