Yesterday MapGuide Open Source 1.0.1 was released, without much fanfare. The release notes give a long list of items that have been worked on for this release.

The big news for what is otherwise just a point release is that this is the first release to be bundled with Web Studio, the Open Source tool for managing MapGuide data and maps. I wrote a bit about this earlier, and have since had a chance to install it. I have to say that Web Studio is, hands-down, the most desktop-like web application that I have ever used. If you get a chance, it’s worth checking out.

Apart from that, I am impressed with the performance and stability work that went into this point release. The application is noticeably faster on my VMWare test machine. This is primarily due to considerable effort by the developers, but I think that it may also help that they have chosen to run both PHP and the MapGuide agent through FastCGI. I believe that this allows better use of resources.

A lot of work also went into enhancing the OGC Web Services portion of the application. It provides both a higher level of compliance in what MapGuide delivers, and an increased tolerance of external web services that have interpreted the OGC standards differently.

Kudos to the application development team on this one. I look forward to seeing a roadmap of where MapGuide Open Source will be going now that the first major release has been stabilised and is gaining traction.

-J