Introducing: New experimental bindings for the MapGuide API

I haven't been quiet on the MapGuide front. I've just been deeply entrenched in my lab conducting an important experiment whose results are finally coming into fruition that I am back here to make this exciting announcement.

That experiment was: Can we generate bindings for the MapGuide API using a vanilla version of SWIG? Yes we can!

Background

This is an important question that we needed an answer for and we wanted that answer to be "Yes". 

We currently provide bindings for the MapGuide API in:

• Java
• PHP 5.x
• .net (full framework)

However, we currently use an ancient and heavily modified version of SWIG, whose unclear audit trail of modifications and changes means that being able to support newer versions of PHP (ie. PHP 7.x) or variants of .net like .net Core is nigh-impossible, which puts us in a bit of a pickle because:

• PHP 5.6 (our current bundled version of PHP) will be end-of-life on December 2018. Bundling and targeting an EOL version of PHP is not a good look. To bundle the current version of PHP (7.x) we need to be able to generate a compatible PHP extension for it. We can't do that with current internal copy of SWIG as the zend extension APIs have massively breaking changes from PHP5 to PHP7.
• .net Core is where the action is at in the .net space, and not having a presence in this space diminishes our story of being able to build MapGuide applications in .net because as time goes on, that definition of ".net" will assume to mean both the (windows-only) full framework and (cross-platform) .net core.
• We may want to add support for additional programming languages in the future. Can't do it with our super-modified copy of SWIG again because of the unclear history of changes made to this tool.

Given these factors, and the untenable situation we currently find ourselves in technology-wise, we needed to explore the possibility of generating the bindings using a vanilla (un-modified) version of SWIG. If we're going to go vanilla, we want the latest and greatest, which supports generating bindings for PHP7, and can support .net core with the right amount of SWIG typemap elbow-grease, so all the more motivation to get this working!

What we now have

2 months since the decision to embark on this journey, the mission to get functional MapGuide bindings using vanilla SWIG has been a success! We now have the following bindings for the MapGuide API:

• A Java binding modeled on the non-crufty official Java binding. Requires Java 7 or higher.
• A (currently windows-only) PHP extension for PHP 7.1
• A netstandard2.0-compatible binding for .net that works on both .net Core and full framework and is also cross-platform for platforms where both .net Core and official MapGuide binary packages are available for. For Linux, that means this .net binding works in Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit (where .net Core also has packages available). The nuget package for this binding is fully self-contained and includes the necessary native dependencies (both 32 and 64-bit) needed for the .net library to work. For .net full framework, it includes an MSBuild .targets file to ensure all the required native dependencies are copied out to your application's output directory.

Where to get it

You can grab the bits from the releases page of the mapguide-api-bindings GitHub repo.

For .net, you will have to setup a local package source and drop the nuget package there in order to consume in your library/application.

You will need MapGuide Open Source 3.1.1 installed as this is the only version of MapGuide I am generating these bindings for and testing against. Please observe the current supported platform matrix to see what combinations of technology stacks work with this new set of bindings. Please also observe the respective notes on the .net, PHP and Java bindings to observe what changes and adjustments you need to make in your MapGuide application should you want to try out these bindings.

Sample applications (to make sure this stuff works)

As proof that these bindings work, here's a sample asp.net core application using the new MapGuide .net binding. As a testament to what targeting .net Core gives us, you could bypass building the sample application from source and perhaps give the self-contained package a go. Thanks to the powerful publishing capabilities provided by the dotnet CLI, we can publish a self-contained .net core application with zero external dependencies. In the case of this sample application, you can download the zip, extract it to a windows or Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit machine with a standard MapGuide Open Source 3.1.1 install, run the MvcCoreSample executable within, go to http://localhost:5000 and your MapGuide application is up and running!

For Java and PHP, I'm still cooking up some sample applications in the same vein as the asp.net core one (ie. Porting across the MapGuide Developer's Guide samples), but for now the only verification that these bindings work is that our current binding test suite run to completion (with some failures, but these failures are known failures that are also present in our current bindings).

Where to from here?

I intend for the mapguide-api-bindings project to serve as an incubation area where we can iron out any show-stopping problems before planning for the eventual inclusion into MapGuide proper and supplementing (and in the case of PHP, replacing) our current bindings because eventually, we have to. We cannot keep bundling and targeting PHP 5.x forever. We need to be able to target newer versions of these programming languages, and maybe in some cases new programming languages.

mapguide-api-bindings project repo
asp.net core sample application repo