MapGuide Open Source 2.5 released

Here it is! The final release of MapGuide Open Source 2.5.

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This final release includes the following changes from RC2

Fusion

We landed in a big changeset which should put this whole saga of conflicting widgets behind us:

• Quick Plot, Select Radius and Select Polygon widgets are no longer mutually-exclusive widgets. For Select Radius/Polygon this means they are now "click once to select once" affairs. If you need to re-select, just re-click the menu/toolbar item.
• All digitizer actions now raise a new MAP_DIGITIZER_ACTIVATED event when digitization begins and raise a new MAP_DIGITIZER_DEACTIVATED event when digitization stops. All widgets that would require the user to draw a geometric shape will raise these events
• The maptip, pan and zoom widgets will disable/restore themselves on these digitizer events to prevent them for interfering with you drawing your geometry. You can still mouse wheel zoom while digitizing, panning while digitizing is not possible. Ideally, we'd like to still pan around while digitizing with the middle mouse button, but the mouse button is hard-coded in OpenLayers :( Something that's nice to address in the future.
• Fix the z-index on the Scalebar widget which caused it to be drawn *below* the map viewer.
• Small UI tweaks on the FeatureInfo/Query/Redline widgets
• All digitization prompts now have a cancellation link attached just in case the manual button (eg. Measure) or ESC key cancellation method is not available

Other changes

• MgException::GetDetails() now includes the stack trace information as per API documentation.
• MgFeatureService::UpdateFeatures() should now behave correctly in non-transactional mode. This API should finally behave as described in the API documentation and my dedicated post to it.

What's next?

I've been trying to push for faster release cycles (I think we can all agree 2.4 to 2.5 has been much faster than 2.2 to 2.4), but realistically I don't think we will see a 2.6 release until early 2014 at the most.

This is because MapGuide is strongly tied to FDO and unlike MapGuide, I don't have much influence with FDO's release cycle. I don't really want to put out new releases of MapGuide that use a trunk build of FDO unless they're preview releases. I cannot consider starting a release cycle for 2.6 until the next FDO at least hits beta and since history has shown that new binary releases of FDO happen around December-April, we should try to adjust the MapGuide release cycle to be in sync with FDO as much as we can.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. As it means we have plenty of time in the interim to land in this backlog of new features that couldn't make it into 2.5 and flesh out some sandboxed work into fully working new features that can realistically land in 2.6.

So I guess what that means realistically is that in terms of any future MapGuide releases this year, you'll probably only be seeing 2.5.x point releases and maybe the occasional 2.6 preview release as a "snapshot" of what's happening for 2.6. 2.6 proper probably won't happen until 2014 ticks over.