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

[carlj]

I did somewhat expect that Flash would become a prominent option as a plug-in
based technology. 

I have tried to make the point that I don't think that JavaScript and a
plug-in viewer are mutually exclusive. My thinking was that we have at least
one of each. That has much more chance of success. In the past we have had
the AJAX viewer and the DWF viewer. The problem is that with the DWF viewer
unsupported now then we only have the AJAX viewer. I think the drawing panel
in HTML5 has promise. 

I also think dropping support to IE 6 is a good plan as most organisations
are doing that anyway. It may be harder to drop support for IE 7 and IE 8 as
there are still a lot of users using them. However it may be that case that
once customers are able to see the benefits of what can be achieved in a
HTML5 enabled browser that pushing for them to change browser might be
justified.

I am not if favour of using ActiveX as a plug-in technology. Flash has
largest ready installed based of compliant browsers. I may just like to
point out that Java is cross platform too and since being open sourced and
GPL'ed is now starting to be bundled as standard on most Linux
distributions. I did sort of expect that memories of a lot of rather bad
applets and the general move away from Applets would make it harder to sell
that as a plug-in solution. I think JavaFX is changing that but still I
think I would have a tough time persuading others on here to go down that
route.

The reason I was talking about de-serializing the C++ object is that this
way of doing things would work for prototyping against the existing already
released versions of MapGuide without requiring modification. This I saw as
good from my perspective of at least proving the concept and being able to
gain some benchmark data as to the relative performance gains which could be
achieved when pushing out rendering on the client.

I have a pragmatic problem with using Flash in the sort term and that is
that I simply do not own the development tools to be able to develop with
flash. That is not to say I cannot buy the tools at some point but it does
mean right now I cannot develop with Flash regardless of whether I want to
until I can buy the tools.

I am starting research shortly. I have been desperately trying to save up
all I can for the equipment I need to get me started. If I were to get Flash
studio I would probably opt saving up and buying the entire Adobe suite.
That cost about £1000 which isn't exactly small change to me. I will have to
pay for everything out of my own pockets because I will be a contractor so
don't have the benefit of a big company with deep pockets behind me to pay
for such tools. I expect it would be several months before I could save up
that money. If I am updating my development tools I may also be looking at
maybe £200-£300 if I choose to update to the latest version of IntelliJ
(though there are free alternatives so I don't have to upgrade). There would
be about £500 of cost if I update my licence of Visual Studio 2005 Standard
to Visual Studio 2008 Pro. I should probably have access to a licence of
Visual Studio via the University but I am not sure about the legalities. If
I am contributing code created in a non commercial version of Visual Studio
then I know I cannot sell what I create with it. However does this affect
code contributed to the Geospatial Open Source project which Autodesk may
use in commercial software? I am not sure what the rules are there.

I am still kind of interested to see what JavaFX can do but maybe I could
just play around with a prototype and even if no-one wanted to use it I
would have some code I can reuse in my research.   
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