[mapguide-users] MapGuide Open Source Web Studio

[Andy Morsell]

Wow, that really does look great.  I'm confused on a couple of issues,
though.  First, it doesn't support load procedures, etc.  I think that makes
sense for a pure web-based authoring tool, but at this point, people will
still have to use MapGuide Studio to load their data and then author it with
this tool instead?  I could see that a company may choose to have a couple
of licenses of Studio for this and other advanced functionality purposes and
then use the open source version for other folks needing to create maps from
that data.  I also imagine that others will eventually develop open source
tools for loading data without the need for Studio. 

Second, you say that it doesn't support web layouts.  Are the webLayout's in
the Web Studio version different than MapGuide Studio web layouts?

Thanks again for developing this open source tool.  It will be very useful.


Andy Morsell, P.E.
Spatial Integrators, Inc.
http://www.SpatialGIS.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Spencer [mailto:pspencer at dmsolutions.ca] 
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 1:25 PM
To: users at mapguide.osgeo.org
Subject: [mapguide-users] MapGuide Open Source Web Studio

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

+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|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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