Slashgeo

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!

Not major, but pretty useful for those seeking MapGuide Open Source information: the MapGuide Central. Via this blog.

The dont adjust your mind blog informs us Fusion 1.1.0 has been released. This is important news for the MapGuide Open Source community and users. From the announcement: "Fusion is a web-mapping application development framework for MapGuide OS and MapServer built primarily in JavaScript. It allows non-spatial web developers to build rich mapping applications quickly and easily. Using widgets, developers are able to add, remove, or modify functionality using standard-compliant HTML and CSS. Fusion does not require any proprietary browser plug-ins and works in all the major browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux." The release notes, 60+ new features and bugs squashed, can be found here. We mentioned Fusion before, see related stories below.

Geospatial Solutions offers an article named The history of MapGuide. The introduction: "Until the mid- to late 1990s, GIS was confined to large workstations that could house both the data and the stand-alone software that made the end product of GIS (which was often a hard-copy map). However, it was at this time that the Internet and networks were also becoming more common, creating a population of users who had access to the World Wide Web. GIS was slowly being adopted within the private sector through mainstream IT departments, but had already become a mature implementation in governmental and academic organizations. Because government and academia needed to distribute maps to users who lacked expensive and proprietary GIS software, Web mapping was born." See also related stories below.

MapGuide Open Source 2.1 has been released. From the announcement: "Along with the many bug fixes, this release has: * many improvements in performance, scalability and stability; * an improved error reporting system; * raster re-projection; * and CS-Map as the coordinate system library." See also related stories below.

APB shares a positive report on Autodesk's continuing support of the geospatial open source community. Let's not forget Autodesk has been a strong supporter since the very beginning of OSGeo in February 2006. They're also behind MapGuide Open Source. From the report: "
•    Autodesk has recently signed up for another year of OSGeo sponsorship
•    Autodesk’s Geoff Zeiss appointed to OSGeo Board of Directors
•    Probably a dozen Autodesk developers as active contributors of OSGeo project code and head of Product Steering Committees (PSCs)
•    Autodesk continues to submit Open Source RFCs and fix defects as per our regular schedule tied to our commercial versions
•    Autodesk has handed over building of the MapGuide Open Source projects to the community to allow greater flexibility and control by the community in order to run independent of Autodesk’s commercial schedule
•    New releases of MapGuide Open Source 2.1 and FDO 3.4.1 in November 2009
•    Attended and exhibited at FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney""

It's been almost a year since we last mentioned Maestro, and yesterday was announced the release of MapGuide Maestro 2.0. Reminder: " MapGuide Maestro is an Open Source (LGPL) map authoring tool for MapGuide Open Source." The first link above offers a list and screenshots of the top 10 features of MapGuide Maestro 2.0: 1. Theming, with ColorBrewer Suport 2. Expression Editor 3. Resource Validation 4. Improved XML Editor 5. Profiling 6. Package Management 7. Custom Resource Templates 8. Duplicate Resource 9. Colour-Coded Resource Tree 10. General Usability. See also related stories below.