[mapguide-internals] MapGuide Developer's Guide is now in svn!

[Jackie Ng]

Hi All,

As most of you will probably know, there is a flood of basic questions on
the mapguide-users mailing list  that should be easily answered by pointing
them to the MapGuide Developer's Guide, but when:

 a) The guide is not available as an online reference, only as a pdf
 b) The guide has not been updated for over 2 years
 c) The guide only shows code samples in PHP and not Java or .net
 d) The PHP sample this guide does not work in recent MGOS releases.
 e) There is no .net or Java version of the PHP sample

Directing them to the developer's guide in its current form is about as
useful as directing them to /dev/null

I've spent the last few days putting the content of the Developer's Guide
into a source-controllable form. 

In the process of moving the content across I've also done some updates:

 - Removing references to the DWF-based viewer
 - Removing references to eMap-based DWF plotting
 - Updating references to Web Studio >>> Maestro
 - Emphasising the use of convenience APIs introduced with RFC9 and RFC33
 - Remove any sample references to creating MgMap with blank constructor.
This coupled with the point above is a common source of errors. Being a
guide, we should be showing the proper way of doing things.
 - Update and cleanup the actual devguide PHP sample (which hasn't been
fully functional in recent MGOS releases in its current form)

The source is under MgDev\Doc\devguide

http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/browser/trunk/MgDev/Doc/devguide

To build this documentation, you need a Python-based tool called Sphinx
(http://sphinx.pocoo.org). Sphinx can compile this documentation into many
different forms (html, chm, latex) and can easily integrate into our current
build system with a few small changes to build.bat

What I would like to do is find out:

 1. Is there a Sphinx plugin for trac? Both sphinx and trac are Python
applications and if you look at any of the .rst source files through the
trac source browser, you can see that Trac can sort of parse and render the
content, but is obviously failing on the Sphinx-specific directives.  

 2. Failing that is it possible to host a compiled version of this on OSGeo?

There's still some more work to be done, like:

 - .net and Java samples
 - Development Environment Setup
 - Common debugging techniques
 - Using OpenLayers
 - Using Fusion
 - Covering some of the newer MapGuide APIs introduced since the last
published pdf version.
 - Using Maestro API

But all the content from the original devguide is there now.

- Jackie



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