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Choosing Between MapServer and MapGuide OS

posted by Satri on Wednesday March 07, @02:08PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the flamewar? dept.

I'd like your opinion on webmapping technology choice. The context is rather simple, my small team will produce a small prototype which must publish geospatial data on a website. The data is already processed and georeferenced. This is a tiny project but we want to choose the best long term webmapping solution possible. When I asked an internal (to the Canadian Government) mailing list about this, I surprisingly received numerous (and sometimes passionate) answers claiming either MapServer or MapGuide Open Source was best. I unexpectedly stumbled onto a sensible topic! From what I've been told, MapServer is fast, reliable, mature while MapGuide OS is easy to use and configure, modern (e.g. AJAX) and has higher scalability. Other opinions/facts for and against MapServer or MapGuide OS were shared along with several websites which demonstrate those technologies. Our webmapping server will run on Debian, therefore excluding ESRI's ArcIMS. Additionally, MapGuide is already operationally supported in my organization, this obviously favors MapGuide OS but does not exclude MapServer if it's really the best option! To be honest, I haven't took the time yet to do a complete assessment of the two avenues. That said, what's your opinion? Thanks!

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• Comparing Mapguide Opensource with Mapserver

  (Score:2, Interesting)

  by Archaeogeek (998) on Wednesday March 07, @06:46PM (#1287)

  I'm in a similar situation. I have spent a long time playing with mapserver over the last three or four years, but found that my web-design skills weren't really up to creating a slick looking website from it, though it's undeniably powerful. I like Mapguide Opensource a lot from that point of view, because even the basic offering is very slick and professional looking. However, and it's a big however for me- the range of platforms that it can be installed on is limited. Again, it depends how much experience you have, but if you don't have time to teach yourself the minutae of compiling programs from source, ie if you have a job to do as well, then you're going to be limited as to which linux versions you can install it on. I have tried and failed with Suse and most recently with Ubuntu, though I got it working on Fedora once. So: if you can get it installed, I would say Mapguide Opensource looks the nicest off the shelf. BUT, there is always a place for Mapserver as a back end WMS/WFS server- that kind of thing is so easy to setup and administer. That's just one person's opinion though- and I'm an archaeologist, not a web designer or linux programmer...
  • Re:Comparing Mapguide Opensource with Mapserver

    (Score:3, Informative)

    by jachym (899) on Thursday March 08, @04:16AM (#1289)

    IMHO you you are comparing two different things: MapServer has basicaly no default GUI (or web interface), however, there are several projects out there, so you basicaly do not need to code anything by hand, just pick something and use it. MapServer is the rendering engine, which will produce your maps pretty good. For a GUI, take pmapper, mapbander, what ever. I have no clue about MapGuide, but if I understand this well, it is shipped together with some GUI and to change this, would be a problem. So it is more monolitic piece of software. I do not say, which one is better. I just wanted to point at some concept differences. Please corect me, if I'm wrong.

    [ Parent ]
    • Re:Comparing Mapguide Opensource with Mapserver

      (Score:3, Informative)

      by Archaeogeek (998) on Thursday March 08, @04:50AM (#1290)

      Yes, you are right to a certain extent. My (not very well worded) reservations about mapserver were really that if you want a really professional looking interface then none of the available ones really cut it - or haven't in the past- unless you want to hand-code something yourself. This might be different now, but when I was exploring this extensively a year or so ago you could tell mapserver interfaces a mile away. I'm sure there have been improvements since then though.
      
      Mapguide Opensource is more monolithic, but it is possible to use it just as the interface, if you use WMS/WFS/databases for the data. Changing how it looks is relatively straightforward using CSS, and it has a really good xml configuration suite although this isn't very well documented. You also don't have to buy the full version of Mapguide Studio as it has it's own web-based system built in.

      [ Parent ]
• re: Choosing Between MapServer and MapGuide OS

  (Score:4, Insightful)

  by pagameba (1003) on Thursday March 08, @01:04PM (#1294)
  ( http://www.dmsolutions.ca/ )

  Here's some comparison points from my experience working with both systems (mapserver 7 years, MGOS since release):

  • Speed. Two parts here ... data access and rendering speed.
    • MapServer's access to data is faster than MGOS's FDO, but a lot of this depends on configuration of the server and the time spent optimizing data. In the common, non-optimized, cases, the performance will end up being roughly equivalent.
    • MapServer is definitely faster, but the difference may be imperceptible, depending on what you are doing. There is a tradeoff though. MapServer has traditionally produced none-antialiased line work. This is very fast, and looks decent. MGOS always anti-aliases line work, so it is always going to be a little slower at rendering, unless you configure MapServer similarly, then it will likely be a much closer match up. Oh, and labels that follow line segments - MapServer doesn't do this (until recently), but MGOS does. If these features aren't important, then MapServer will be faster. If they are, there likely isn't much difference
  • Community. MapServer has the edge too, but I think MGOS is catching up here.
  • Enterprise-ready and scalability. I think they are equivalent personally. There is nothing that MGOS can do that MapServer can't be set up to do as well, in my experience. MGOS just comes pre-configured for scalability, whereas you actually have to do something extra with MapServer to make it work in large-scale environments. In fact, this probably gives MapServer the edge because it can be scaled down to a very light-weight system running on older hardware and still perform well. MGOS can't.
  • Cartography. MapServer has way more flexibility at this time, especially for compounding styles and advanced symbolization. MGOS produces nicer looking maps by default, but you are quite limited (fixed set of line and fill patterns, no composite styles on polygons etc). Overall, MapServer is better - but there is active development in MGOS to fix this and once that is done, MGOS will be at least as capable as MapServer.
  • Configuration. MapServer is configured using plain text files, editable anywhere in anything that can edit text. The syntax is simple to learn and is well documented. MGOS configuration is stored in a binary xml database that is a complete black box - no text editors allowed! But there is a very nice commercial tool (windows only) and a more limited web tool (free, comes with MGOS) for editing the configuration. Having a GUI is nice, but I miss being able to edit files by hand.
  • GIS. MGOS wins here. MGOS has a very nice integrated API for working with data sources and manipulating features. It is arguably complex and difficult to learn, but it is very powerful and tightly integrated into the whole API. MapServer is just starting to integrate some GIS capabilities, but it is quite limited at this point. It is normally necessary to work with data sources outside of the MapServer API if you want to edit features and attributes (i.e. work with postgis directly).

  Overall, I like MapServer better as it is lighter and easier to work with. But there are some features it just doesn't have, so when we need those for our clients, we now turn to MGOS. In the end, you need to look very carefully at your requirements and operating parameters and do a careful feature-by-feature comparison to choose
• OSGeo

  (Score:0)

  by Anonymous Voxel on Thursday March 08, @06:31PM (#1296)

  Since both MapServer and Map Guide Open Source are open source projects under the OSGeo umbrella, won't the two inevitably merge? There is overlap of functionality and the source code liscence facilitates sharing of code.
  
  It might not matter in the future which one you choose now.
  
  nick
  • Re:OSGeo

    (Score:3)

    by Satri (3) on Friday March 09, @01:08PM (#1299)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )

    "won't the two inevitably merge?"
    
    I don't think so. MapServer and MapGuide are so different, it makes no sense trying to merge the code. Additionally, MapServer is well established and won't disappear anytime soon, while MapGuide has the behemoth Autodesk behind it. So I tend to believe: both are here to stay and will never merge. However, of course, being open source, both could be inspired by the other webmapping tool and even salvage code from the other.

    [ Parent ]