Choosing the Right Web Framework or Tooling for Large-Scale Cesium Applications

Hello everyone,

I’m working on a web application (currently developed using Angular) where the Cesium map is a critical component. The application needs to:

  • Handle and render large numbers of entities like polygons, polylines, billboards, and more.
  • Efficiently process real-time updates to these entities at a high frequency.
  • Integrate complex 3D assets and interactions seamlessly.

As we look to refine and potentially improve our tech stack, I’m curious if anyone has insights or experiences regarding the choice of web framework or tooling for such use cases.

To be clear: This is not intended to spark a debate about specific frameworks (e.g., Angular vs. React). Rather, I want to understand whether certain frameworks or tools provide notable advantages when working with Cesium at scale. Specifically:

  • Are there frameworks or tools that offer better performance or developer experience when integrating with Cesium?
  • Any lessons learned or best practices when working on high-performance, large-scale Cesium-based applications?
  • Have you come across scenarios where specific frameworks had limitations or excelled in this context?

I’m particularly interested in areas like performance, scalability, and ease of managing complex features like 3D assets and dynamic interactions.

Your suggestions, experiences, and resources would be incredibly helpful as we evaluate our options.

Thank you in advance!

Hi @Abhishek_Aneja,

I’ll defer to developers who may have more experience using CesiumJS with specific frameworks, but I did want to chime in and mention that since CesiumJS is vanilla JS, it should be compatible with any UI framework. Many of these frameworks, such as React, aim to optimize DOM manipulations which are typically the bottleneck in many web applications. CesiumJS on the other hand does not do much DOM manipulation as the bulk of its functionality deals with render to a single canvas element via WebGL. TLDR; I don’t think any particular framework has notable advantages when working with CesiumJS.

On the backend we have some examples of integrating with different build systems– webpack and vite– which cover the typical build process for most popular frameworks.

Thanks, and I do look forward to hearing from other’s experiences.

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