Mapbox GL JS Patterns

Quick Guide: Mapbox GL JS renders vector tiles on the GPU, and the whole mental model is sources hold data, layers visualize them, expressions make the visualization data-driven. One source can feed several layers, and a layer's appearance is decided by a JSON expression rather than by JavaScript touching features. Everything that adds data waits for the style — load or style.load — because the map has no style at construction. Clustering is a flag on a GeoJSON source, not a plugin. Current: v3, where the Standard style is the default and custom layers are placed into named slots rather than before a layer id.

Detailed Resources:

• examples/core.md — map setup and cleanup, markers, popups, controls, camera animation, feature-state hover, custom controls
• examples/layers.md — sources, every layer type, expressions, filters, clustering, safe removal
• examples/interaction.md — 3D terrain, fog, fill-extrusion, heatmaps, geocoder and directions plugins, queryRenderedFeatures, image sources
• reference.md — v3 migration, slots and configuration, layer and source tables, the full expression operator list, event table, performance tuning