Generating Server-side tile maps with Node.js (Part 2 - Using Mapnik)

Part 1 - Programatically with Canvas
Part 2 - Using Mapnik

On my previous post I've shown how to use node.js to generate server-tiles, painting them "manually" using the canvas API. This is perfect for those scenarios where one wants to overlay dynamic or custom data on top of an existing map. The following images (although done on client-side with canvas) are good examples of this:

Now, suppose we don't want to generate data on top of a map but the map itself. Meaning, a tile more or less similar to this:

This is very complex as it requires loading spatial data, painting the countries, roads, rivers, labels, always taking into account the zoom level, etc. Not trivial at all.