[mapguide-internals] Future Development Options for Web Server Extensions and new High Performance Viewer

[carlj]

Lots of ideas and discussion.

There are two oposite schools of thought regarding rich content in the web.
I don't think different options need to be mutually exclusive. A more
powerful AJAX viewer is still a good improvement. 

The division on the web at the moment is those advocating pluginless
solutions using JavaScript and new features of HTML 5. I think the
improvements are welcome but one obstacle I see stands in the way. Internet
Explorer. There have long been many features which the web industry as a
whole has been trying to standardise on but Microsoft has dragged their
feet. In an ideal world where Internet Explorer was fully standards
compliant and kept up with the features of the other browsers things would
be different for my part. I don't care for Internet Explorer personally but
unfortunately it has the majority of the market share. It would be good if
either Internet Explorer catches up to the other browsers or looses enough
market share that it can be ignored. Unfortunately I don't count on much
likelyhood of either for the forseeable future.

The thing about using a plugin based solution is it is able to deliver a
very consistent experience across browsers and across platforms.

The one plugin technology with the widest adoption is Flash. I had a look at
Action Script but unlike Java and .Net there isn't a straightforward mapping
of all C/C++ primitive types. This isn't a brick wall by any means but where
Java or .Net could happily have enough low level control to deserialize
MapGuide classes from binary (taking into account endian missmatches
possibly) but I don't think Action Script was designed for that kind of
heavy programming control. The problem with Flash technology is that it has
been geared towards designers and so the scripting side has been dummed
down. As time goes on the programming capabilities are been beefed up and I
expect that to continue as it competes with JavaFX and Silverlight.

I would have to ask whether the rendering algorithms and rotines are covered
by the opensource or are proprietary to Autodesk?

Trevor, you are advocating using C++ but what kind of plugin technology are
you wanting to use to wrap it? Are you talking about another ActiveX
control? Are you talking about wrapping native code in a Java applet using
JNI?
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