Navara

Web map engines have long forced a choice: engines with polished declarative APIs are easy to adopt but hard to extend beyond their built-in features, while engines that expose deep low-level control are powerful but demand steep expertise. Fully 3D globe applications usually leave no option but the latter. Navara is a highly extensible 3D map engine built to remove that trade-off. It streams real-world GIS data, from satellite imagery and terrain to 3D city models and vector data, onto an interactive globe, and lets you present it the way your application needs: as a clean basemap for data visualization, styled per feature by attributes, or as a photorealistic scene with atmosphere, sunlight, and shadows.

Navara’s answer to the trade-off is a tiered API. Capabilities are organized into four tiers, so you start with the simplicity of a declarative engine and drop down, as far as the render pipeline itself, only when you need more control:

• Declarative: declare sources and layers as plain config objects (basemaps, terrain, vector data, 3D Tiles). Meshes, effects, and lights work the same declarative way.
• Plugin: add purpose-built features as ready-made…