[mapguide-internals] Re: Mapguide roadmap

Trevor Wekel trevor_wekel at otxsystems.com
Fri May 27 12:20:15 EDT 2011


Hello Ivan,

Jackie is dead on.  Autodesk is the primary contributor to MapGuide Open Source.  And since the MapGuide Open Source code base is incorporated into Autodesk's commercial products, they have to be very careful about releasing information to the public.  Autodesk may be prototyping new features.  After prototyping, they may write an RFC if it makes sense to contribute the feature to the community.

To date, I believe the most significant community contribution (non-Autodesk) is Maestro.  With all the work going into Maestro, I suspect that Ennoble Consultancy is funding it heavily.

On the HTML5/flash/silverlight MapGuide viewer, I have been interested in developing a Flash based viewer for MapGuide that would move rendering and basic user interaction client side, work with Ajax and Fusion, and also work on mobile devices.  I have been using OpenScales http://www.openscales.org for a few months now.  It is an open source ActionScript 3 / Flex mapping framework which was originally derived from OpenLayers.

For lightweight maps with straightforward stylization, OpenScales does work across a wide range of browsers and devices (IE8, Firefox, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1).  Currently, it supports a small subset of MapGuide's stylization capabilities.  It will take time and effort to implement the full suite of MapGuide stylization rules using OpenScales.  Being a small consulting company, it is difficult for me to put aside man months of development effort to work on a project like this.

There may be other developers in the community that are in the same boat as myself.  Lots of good ideas and no funding to make things happen.

So what are your clients interested in seeing?  As an open source project, the community can have direct impact on the project if they are willing to fund development efforts.


Regards,
Trevor


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