[mapguide-users] MGOS and provider for raster data by autodesk and gdal

[Frank Warmerdam]

robert fritz wrote:
> hello,
> 
> i installed mgos (1.0.1 and then updated to 1.1). there is an
> raster-fdo-provider by autodesk in the folder \server\bin\fdo. i'm a little
> bit confused about it, because i was told, that the raster provider by
> autodesk is exclusive for mg-enterprise. who knows about this ? ist the
> raster provider by autodesk "opensource" or is just "free" or is a part of
> mgos by mistake or am I wrong? 

Robert,

Perhaps it is the provider left over from your 1.0.1 install?  I'll leave
this to others.

 > does anybody knows about differences in
> performance and quality between autodesk's raster  provider and the gdal
> raster provider?

The GDAL (open source) raster provider is only half implemented and should
be considered at best "beta quality" for the features it has.  This README
should give some sense of what is done and what isn't.

   http://svn.osgeo.org/svn/fdogdal/trunk/Providers/GDAL/Src/Provider/README

For practical purposes the negatives of the GDAL provider are likely to be:

  1) It is broken in the 1.1.0 release on windows (see patch email from
     yesterday)
  2) Currently performance is likely to be poor for directories with a lot of
     raster files.
  3) Some formats supported by the old driver are not supported by the GDAL
     driver (or at least not in the stock builds provided) such as MrSID and
     ECW (I still hoping to provide plugins for these)
  4) The phase 1 open source provider does not supported rotated files.
  5) The MOSAIC option might turn out to be important though it isn't clear
     to me how it is used in MapGuide.
  6) The open source provider is very new and might easily be buggy.

On the plus side, the open source provider does have a bunch of formats
not in the autodesk ATIL based provider.  Of course they might not be of
much interest to web mappers. :-)

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org