MapGuide Open Source 2.0 beta1: Chock full o’ goodness

Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 3:09 am Posted in MapGuide, Open Source

Get ‘em while they’re hot, the MapGuide Open Source 2.0 beta installers are ready for your consumption.

Grab the source code or installers, and then head over to the samples page to find some Fusion layout examples to play with. The Milestone, Release, and Release Notes pages provide more information for the details-inclined.

This release absolutely has enough new features to justify a major version jump. Although the list of new features and bug fixes in this release is immense, a few of the biggies (in my mind) are:

  • Fusion Support (by DM Solutions Group)
  • Introduction of AGG rendering (optional)
  • Stability Improvements
  • JSON output format from CGI calls for easier AJAX

The initial Fusion technology preview was really cool looking, but this beta shows off what is possible to an even larger extent. Have a look at the following screen shots!

Fusion Example 1

Fusion Example 2

Fusion Example 3

Fusion Example 4

Fusion Example 5

If that doesn’t give you a reasonable idea of the flexibility and capabilities of MapGuide Open Source when coupled with Fusion, I don’t know what will :)

The AGG renderer, while somewhat less flashy, is nonetheless a major improvement in MapGuide’s ability to deliver nice looking maps to the user. Have a look at the GD version of a zoomed-in area of my cemetery map:

GD Renderer Example

And compare it to the AGG version of the same:

AGG Renderer Example

Pay special attention to the accurate rendering of line widths, and the nice smooth anti-aliasing.

Although stability has been addressed throughout the code base, another feature that I have been waiting for is losing FastCGI support in favour of a native Apache module and ISAPI extension. FastCGI caused intermittent service interruptions, and these new modules appear to have addressed this problem. My testing to this point has shown considerably higher stability.

And finally, JSON output from the MapAgent will make application developers’ lives a lot easier. Rather than getting back XML from the MapAgent, you can request JSON so you don’t have to deal with XML parsing any more.

Of course, with the amount of changes that went into this release under the hood, it’s likely that there will be some issues. Please make sure that if you run into a bug you report it.

-J

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2 Responses to “MapGuide Open Source 2.0 beta1: Chock full o’ goodness”

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  1. 1Ivan Milicevic on Nov 22, 2007 at 5:58 am:

    Great stuff! Really.

  2. 2knife on Nov 23, 2007 at 9:17 pm:

    it looks nice,