Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers. See http://polymaps.org for more details.

This is the master branch, which contains the Polymaps source code. If you're looking for the Polymaps website, you should checkout the gh-pages branch instead.

You'll find lots of Polymaps examples in the suitably-named examples directory. Open any of the HTML files there in your browser to view the examples, or open them in your text editor of choice to view the source. Most of the examples are replicated on the Polymaps website, though a few of them are only visible locally.

Some of the examples depend on third-party libraries, such as jQuery. These third-party libraries are not required to use Polymaps but can certainly make it easier! All third-party libraries should be stored in the lib directory, with an associated LICENSE file and optional README.

We use GitHub to track issues with Polymaps. You can search for existing issues, and file new issues, here:

http://github.com/simplegeo/polymaps/issues

You are welcome to file issues either for bugs in the source code, feature requests, or issues with the Polymaps website.

If you have questions or problems regarding Polymaps, you can get help by joining the #polymaps IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. You are also welcome to send GitHub messages or tweets to mbostock.

You do not need to build Polymaps in order to view the examples; a compiled copy of Polymaps (polymaps.js and polymaps.min.js) is included in the repository.

To edit and build a new version of Polymaps, you must first install Java and GNU Make. If you are on Mac OS X, you can install Make as part of the UNIX tools included with XCode. Once you've setup your development environment, you can rebuild Polymaps by running the following command from the repo's root directory:

make

The Polymaps build process is exceptionally simple. First, all the JavaScript files are concatenated (using cat); the order of files is important to preserve dependencies. This produces the file polymaps.js. Second, this file is put through Google's Closure Compiler to minify the JavaScript, resulting in a smaller polymaps.min.js.

If you are doing development, it is highly recommended that you use the non-minified JavaScript for easier debugging. The minified JavaScript is only intended for production, where file size matters. Note that the development version is marked as read-only so that you don't accidentally overwrite your edits after a re-build.