Publishing your base map on your server with Node.js

As we explained in the previous chapter, PHP is not the ideal technology to use to serve our tiles. This is not because PHP is a bad language or anything similar; it's because there are other technologies that excel in multithreading operations, which is exactly what's needed when serving tiles at an enormous speed.

In this recipe, we will use TileStream, which is a high-performance tile server powered by MBTiles. TileStream is maintained by Mapbox and uses Node.js and SQLite as the backend technologies.

In the preceding PHP recipe, we converted the tiles to the XYZ format to squeeze out any performance benefits while serving the tiles. Node.js doesn't have any performance issues while reading the tiles directly from the MBTiles container, which is just a SQLite database, so we don't need to convert the tiles in this case.

We can use the MBTiles we exported in the previous recipe. Then we will download TileStream from GitHub, which is the...