Thursday 8 April 2010

FDO Toolbox is dead. Long live FDO Toolbox

This post is an official announcement that development of FDO Toolbox will be winding down.

The reasons for winding down are three-fold:

1. My original goals of FDO Toolbox have been met. With the exception of certain esoteric bits of the FDO API, my primary design goal of FDO Toolbox being a "front-end" to the FDO API has been effectively met.

2. I am taking over from Kenneth Skovhede as the primary maintainer of MapGuide Maestro.

3. Now being the primary maintainer, Maestro is now my primary focus. My long-term vision for Maestro is to have the data creation, querying, analysis and ETL capabilities of FDO Toolbox in addition to the publishing capabilities of Maestro, forming the ultimate tool for geospatial data. So to this end, you will see many parts of FDO Toolbox being merged into future releases of Maestro. So in a way FDO Toolbox will live on as part of the Maestro project.

Version 1.0 of FDO Toolbox, which will have the final version of FDO 3.5.0 will be the final release. After that, I'll be moving on full-time (my free time that is :D) to the MapGuide and Maestro projects and as a result, you'll be seeing more Maestro-related bloggery in the future.

R.I.P. FDO Toolbox (2008-2010)

3 comments:

Ivan Milicevic said...

Hi!

This sounds promissing. I'm convinced that you are going to build up Maestro to next level.

נמרוד כנען said...

Congratulation, the creativity you have shown up at the FDOToolbox project is also expected!
Should we expect some of the FDTB functionality merged into the Maestro?

Jackie Ng said...

Yes but not immediately. You'll see bits of FDO Toolbox copied over to Maestro over time.