Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. It's
written in C++ and there are Python bindings to facilitate fast-paced
agile development. It can comfortably be used for both desktop and web
development, which was something wanted from the beginning.

Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It uses the AGG library and
offers world class anti-aliasing rendering with subpixel accuracy for
geographic data. It is written from scratch in modern C++ and doesn't
suffer from design decisions made a decade ago. When it comes to
handling common software tasks such as memory management, filesystem
access, regular expressions, parsing and so on, Mapnik doesn't re-invent
the wheel, but utilizes best of breed industry standard libraries from
boost.org.