My MapGuide/FDO Wishlist for 2012: Revisited

Firstly, how did my wishlist from last year turn out?

FDO

1. Raster support for the PostGIS provider

Nothing has happened on this front, and frankly adding such support is a tall order. I've looked at the GenericRdbms codebase (from which the PostGIS provider is built on top of), and it requires some major foundational changes to support raster data types, and this has to be done in a way without breaking any of the other providers that are built from the same foundation. And then there's the problem of grokking the complex GenericRdbms codebase as well.

I truly believe that FDO should have a provider that can do both raster/vector data to allow for truly integrated spatial data stores. It could be PostGIS + PostGIS raster, or it could be SpatialLite + RasterLite. Whatever it is, FDO should have a provider that supports it.

2. A more FDO-capable OGR provider

Still nothing on this front sadly.

3. FDO Join support for other FDO RDBMS providers

This is an unknown quantity. I don't think the other RDBMS providers have gained the benefits of join support added for the SQL Server Provider yet. A shame.

MapGuide

1. Improve MapGuide's standing as a geospatial services platform

Nothing has changed here either. However my improved understanding of the Web Tier's role in MapGuide   has armed me with the knowledge to explore how we can improve this situation. You can see this in the AS YET UN-ANNOUNCED PROJECT, and the discovery of the previously cryptic MgHttpRequest and MgHttpResponse classes.

So while we can't say that the 2.5 milestone of MapGuide will support all these geospatial web services that we've desired for so long, it should have the solid infrastructure from which we can build support for such required services in future releases using things such as the AS YET UN-ANNOUNCED PROJECT as a testbed for implementation ideas.

2. Native support for PDF output

We have PDF output, but it's not native and is only available for Fusion that will come with the 2.5 milestone of MapGuide. Still this will hopefully be a good intermediate solution in the meantime.