[mapguide-internals] MapGuide RFC 68 - Refactoring Web .NET API into Common DLLs is ready for review.

[Jason Birch]

Hi all,

I personally don't see the utility in separating MapGuide module into separate libraries, and lots of potential confusion.  I also have a question about backwards compatibility for the .Net users.

In general, PHP modules cover a broad swath of functionality (everything related to a single technology), and users configure them once in the php.ini file and don't worry about them again.  I'm not sure how this works in .Net, but I'd imagine that many users would be surprised to have to reference multiple DLLs just to build a MapGuide web app.

Up until this point, developers haven't needed to have an understanding of where in the code an API is implemented.  Indeed, the documentation is not broken down by these classifications, but instead by services, which is how most MapGuide developers understand the code.  Forcing developers to understand the underlying distribution of the code would add unnecessary complexity to an environment that already has a relatively steep learning curve.

A question I have (as a non-.Net developer) is whether this change will require existing applications to be modified to individually reference all of the DLLs (or just the ones needed if the developer can figure that out) rather than the single DLL.

I guess I'm having difficulty accepting the reasoning behind this change, and a justification of "isn't good for users" isn't a clear enough reason for me.

Perhaps a concrete example of a case where this refactoring would be advantageous would help me to understand how this would outweigh the potential confusion caused by this change?  Is this a change that is only beneficial to users developing desktop applications based on the MapGuide APIs?  If so, will we be seeing a MapGuide .Net Desktop SDK at some point?

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Leaf Li
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6:45 PM
Subject: [mapguide-internals] MapGuide RFC 68 - Refactoring Web .NET API into Common DLLs is ready for review.

Please review MapGuide RFC 68 - Refactoring Web .NET API into Common DLLs 
http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/MapGuideRfc68