MapGuide Open Source Web Studio

[Paul Spencer]

Hi folks,

DM Solutions Group has announced Web Studio for MapGuide Open Source  
today and I thought I would give you a quick overview.  Unfortunately  
there is no code or live preview available just yet, but it should be  
coming right after the Where 2.0 conference at the end of next week.

Web Studio is being developed by DM Solutions Group for release as  
open source software with MapGuide Open Source.

Web Studio is a web-based tool for managing, creating and editing  
resources in a MapGuide Open Source server.  It will be released  
under the same license as MapGuide Open Source (LGPL) and will be  
included in the SVN repository with MapGuide Open Source.  I would  
imagine that it will be distributed with MapGuide Open Source  
installers as well, although I am not sure if that decision has been  
made yet.

Web Studio has been developed to work in the latest (release)  
versions of Internet Explorer (6), FireFox (1.5), Safari (2) and  
Opera (9), although there are some minor differences between them.   
The primary goal of this release is to enable users to get data into  
the server and create/style layers and maps.  WebLayouts and other  
resources won't be supported in this first version.

Web Studio will not do everything that MapGuide Studio (the  
commercial desktop version) can do.  For instance, it doesn't support  
load procedures or any of the associated functionality (reprojection,  
conversion to sdf, generalization).  It also doesn't support creating  
web layouts, managing symbol libraries and a couple of other tasks.

When it is ready to go next week, this will be a BETA release of Web  
Studio.  It will include the following features:

General GUI Features

* Web 2.0 application (page never submits, uses XmlHttpRequest)
* full menuing system, including submenus and context menus
* integrated toolbars
* embedded MapAgent and Site Administrator tools
* embedded help system with contextual help in dialogs
* moveable and resizeable dialog boxes
* resizeable panels and frames

Resource Management

* log into and disconnect from any MapGuide Open Source server
* resource browsing (tree-based) and management (cut, copy, paste,  
delete)
* resource creation (folders, feature sources, layers and maps only)
* editing of resources, with the possibility to have multiple  
resources open at one time

Resource Editing

* Feature Sources
   * creation
   * properties
   * upload new data files to a feature source
* Layers
   * creation
   * properties
   * change feature source
   * change property mappings
   * set tooltip, filter and URL properties
   * layer styling, including scale ranges, expressions, styles  
(point, line and area), feature labels and legend label
   * preview
* Maps
   * creation
   * properties
   * edit settings
   * manage layers in the map, including Groups, Drawing order and  
Base Layers for smooth navigation
   * preview
* Web Layout
   * properties
   * preview

Web Studio is all new code written by DM Solutions for this project  
(and a couple of external libraries we've chosen to use).  It is  
entirely javascript and HTML with only one small server-side script  
used to redirect requests to the MapAgent that you've chosen to log  
into.  For now, this script is in PHP only.  It wouldn't take much to  
reproduce it in the other languages (JSP and ASP) and we'll be  
looking for contributions on that front!

For those anxious to see what it looks like, I've made some screen  
grabs and posted them here:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/c/cd/Ws1.png
http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/2/22/Ws2.png
http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/d/d0/Ws3.png
http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/5/5f/Ws4.png
http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/f/fc/Ws5.png

Cheers

Paul

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|Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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