Refactor basemap module on top of xyzservices

Hi all,

I’d like to start a focused discussion as a follow-up of https://github.com/geopandas/contextily/issues/153 and https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipyleaflet/issues/741.

We have built a new package called xyzservices to serve as a unified place for XYZ tile management. The idea behind this is that other packages will depend on that instead of having their own system.

In the case of ipyleaflet, that means refactoring basemaps module in a way that does not contain any hard-coded data and only wraps what ``xyzservices` provides.

From a quick look, it could take the form of replacing your Bunch with xyzservices.providers Bunch and of small changes in https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipyleaflet/blob/c969f79da419aef39f63e6745d0f234493280f67/ipyleaflet/leaflet.py#L36 to match the xyzservices API (to get the proper form of URL (xref geopandas/xyzservices/pull/60) and attribution).

xyzservices itself does not have any dependencies which makes it a non-problematic dependency.

Some of you also mentioned you wanted the JSON stored in share. That also comes with xyzservices if you have a use case for that.

I am happy to do any changes in xyzservices needed to make it as useful for you as possible if that allows centralising maintenance of providers in one place.

What are your thoughts on this?

[davidbrochart]

I don’t know if @giswqs is already on it? I like that people are fighting to contribute to ipyleaflet 😄

[sackh]

Thanks, @martinfleis