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

[Jason Birch]

I can't believe that custom ActiveX or Java are seriously being considered.
 Is there no organisational memory of how much of a pain in the ass it was
for customers to maintain multiple implementations of MapGuide just to make
sure that everyone could use it?

Just because ActiveX/Java are the easiest languages to write a client in
because of MapGuide APIs, doesn't mean it should be done.  And I could see
an argument for a .Net/SL-specific map control because of the demand for
this in intranet .Net/Sharepoint development, but not for public
deployment.

At this point, I'm leaning towards the opinion that the project should not
be looking at taking on code for clients that are neither cross-platform,
nor reliably pervasive outside of an intranet environment.  IMO, the only
reasonable high performance solutions for the present and future
respectively are Flash/Flex and HTML5.

Jason

2009/12/24 carlj

>
> As regards Silverlight I did quite a bit of investigation into developing
> with it. Having been working in a .Net company Silverlight was more
> compatible with the skills in the company. (I must confess I didn't have
> much success with getting Silverlight used in the company but there are
> libraries relating to MapGuide which I deliberately wrote such that they
> could be compiled to Silverlight but it will be up to the company I am
> leaving whether they choose to take advantage of that in the future).
>
> Silverlight is a bit trickier than it first appears. It is not a full .Net
> platform. It is only a subset of the API's. What is more any libraries to
> be
> used with Silverlight have to be specifically compiled to work with
> Silverlight and Silverlight therefore cannot use any existing .Net
> libraries. On this line I am almost certain that Silverlight does not
> support calling into any native code. That means that any viewer would have
> to be implemented in pure Silverlight compatible .Net.
>
> If creating .Net from scratch then the source code can be created such that
> it uses a subset of .Net which can both be compiled to regular .Net and
> Silverlight using some conditional compilation (pre-processor) statements
> to
> work around bits where different things need to be done for each platform.
>
> On the Java front, Java in the browser is the same as Java on the desktop.
> It can call into native code (which is why browser Applets using JOGL
> work).
> The JOGL needs a native library to provide the bridge between Java and
> OpenGL. The Webstart mechanism can detect the target platform and make sure
> the right native library is sent out to the client. This allows the same
> applet to work across platforms.
>
> I am dubious from Microsoft’s business practices that the cross platform
> story for Silverlight is likely to be as good as Java.
>
> Java may bring negative images to a lot of people because in the past
> Applets were pretty ugly and the plug-in wasn't good however there is big
> momentum to clean up Applets due to JavaFX. Sun has been very much
> committed
> to JavaFX which involves trying to slim down Java and improve appearance
> and
> performance so it can compete with Flash. Larry Ellison of Oracle has also
> expressed full support for JavaFX.
> Even if the JavaFX side is not use the whole effort has meant that lots of
> improvements in the plug-in and client side performance and start-up times
> etc have been made and continue to be made which improve the performance of
> any Applets not just JavaFX ones.
>
> My thinking was to try and create the basic components in Java and .Net.
> These would be the building blocks to create a viewer.  For me I can get
> more done if I focus on one platform. This means I hope to focus on a Java
> based viewer but could provide libraries which would assist in helping
> someone else if they want to build a Silverlight viewer.
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://n2.nabble.com/Future-Development-Options-for-Web-Server-Extensions-and-new-High-Performance-Viewer-tp4208470p4213044.html
> Sent from the MapGuide Internals mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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