Today, Paul Spencer at DM Solutions Group announced the release of a flexible web mapping framework (working title: Fusion) to the MapGuide Open Source community.
I am extremely happy about this announcement. As a DMSG client, I’ve been working with Fusion for a while now, and am still amazed at the unprecedented level of flexibility and control that it gives MapGuide users in designing their mapping applications.
The beauty of Fusion is that it can be anything you want it to be, but the demo site shows a few neat features. Make sure that you view the source; note the great separation of design and code:
While you’re at the demo site, have a look through the FAQ and Technology Overview Presentation. And if you’re really curious, download a technology preview version of the source code and a sample application. I would caution against developing any large applications with this version; it’s likely to change considerably before release.
-J
P.S. I love comic-book titles
1Ismael on Jul 26, 2007 at 1:25 am:
looks very interesting, only I see not to be able to run the demo (not in IE6, nor in Firefox).
Any additional configurations required ?
2Jason Birch on Jul 26, 2007 at 2:22 am:
Hmm. Just checked and it’s working for me with IE7 and Firefox2. Maybe you hit it at a bad time?
Fusion is supposed to be cross-browser for recent versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari, and I’ve had some luck with Opera as well. You do need to have JavaScript enabled, but apart from that I think it should just work…
3ismael on Jul 26, 2007 at 9:54 am:
It seems I have indeed chosen a bad time to try it. It works fine at the moment and it really looks great
4Jim O'Leary on Jul 29, 2007 at 2:06 pm:
I installed fusion and ran the examples in the samples and demo folders. I saw an interface but what not sure what I was supposed to do with it. I looked in the code as Jason suggested, but just saw a whack of JavaScript. I wasn’t sure how much of this JavaScript was built-in and how much I can customize.
The brief bits of documentation that I found for fusion did not help me. The install page referred to “mapguide”, not “mapguide2008″, so I wasn’t sure how old this doc was. Likewise the MGOS site stated that I needed MGOS 1.2 in order to run fusion, yet it runs on my MGOS 1.1. I found something called EventManager in the docs folder, but it is just a class refernce, not a how-to.
Here is my point: since DM Solutions wants us to get excited about their software, is it too much to ask for them to explain it to us? I don’t have time to go through their code and figure out what everything does. I just barely haveenough time to write this comment.
Thanks.