GeoJSON Lite

GeoJSON is one of the most widely used vector formats in the web mapping, and WebGIS world. It has a nice, robust way of storing various feature types along with their coordinates, and properties. On the top of that, it can be parsed as an ordinary JSON object, thus JavaScript has a native support for it. This is the format supported by every client side web mapping library (I have come across so far), thus it is the perfect candidate for testing the feature parsing, and rendering performance of them. However, what is the best way of generating random features in arbitrary numbers? There were two paths I seriously considered:

• Use an existing client side GeoJSON library. There is the NPM package geojson, which could have been a potential candidate. However, writing a wrapper around it, which have a random generator seemed to be as troublesome as writing a new library for this purpose.
• Generate the features on the server side. There is the Python package geojson, which is perfect, as it has a random feature generator. The downside of this path is the involvement of a server. I would rather have a library, which can generate the features on the client side, thus showcasing the results is not bound to a specific server.

By measuring the benefits, and disadvantages of using one of the two methods, I quickly decided to write my own library for this purpose. It is dead simple, small (11.6 KB compiled), and capable of validating GeoJSON objects (based on the official specs), and generating random ones. As a consequence of its small size, and limited capabilities, it is called GeoJSON Lite.