This weekend the 4.5 version of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript have been released, and it's great.
Especially this new beta function to render featurelayers in WebGL.
Esri blog post : FeatureLayer rendering: taking advantage of WebGL in 2D
Sooo, there is a nice demo about New York building construction, and it's really sweet.
The source code is here : https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/visualization-vv-color-animate/index.html
But New york is a bit far away from where I live though, so why not use Paris? With a lot of historical buildings going way earlier than 1800?
There is the source code for the app, so all you need to do to make a nice Paris map is just to find some building data.
There is a great opendata website from l'Atelier parisien d'urbanisme http://opendata.apur.org/ and a dataset with many information about Paris buildings : http://opendata.apur.org/datasets/002f14c0cf28435296a341d9921adf99_0
Because this is still a beta feature, there are some limitation for WebGL featurelayers
support is limited to layers created from feature services hosted on ArcGIS Online. Non-hosted enterprise feature services and client-side feature collections will be supported in a future release.
And the apur dataset is coming from an ArcGIS Server :-(
So with just a free account on https://developers.arcgis.com/ (you get 50 credits, enough to play and host 200mb+ of data), you can upload the data on your own account and then use it in your app.
http://esrifrance.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=d50dd448c80e46cdbcee8adcd9945a0f
Then replace some variables and enjoy.
Want to learn more about this dataviz?
- Learn ArcGIS : http://learn.arcgis.com/en/
- ArcGIS API for JavaScript : https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/