How to implement dynamic vector tile sever

Question

In my application, the backend (written in Java using spring boot) is serving REST API which expose a service that returns thousands of coordinates (based on filters it gets from the client). My frontend is using this API and then displays the results in Mapbox map.

The performance is not good enough for 100K of points and more, and we want to use vector tiles instead.

Since the data is dynamic, we would want our backend to act as a vector tile server, is this possible?

What's needed in order to server vector tile requests? Is there a library that can help?

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible. It's pretty straightforward to accept a request for a vector tile, then generate that tile and serve it back. It gets a little bit more complex when you factor in caching for performance, and trying to avoid redundant work.

I'm mostly familiar with JavaScript libraries, but mapbox-vector-tile-java looks like it will handle the part of turning geometry into a Mapbox vector tile.