Tuesday 2 October 2018

A short MapGuide poll: What you said

A month-and-a-half ago, I put up a short poll regarding DWF support in MapGuide.

I got 97 responses in the time window that I left that poll open, and this is what you said.

Regarding whether you use this DWF support in MapGuide:



I also posed a hypothetical situation where we removed DWF support from MapGuide and asked how badly you'd be affected as a result:

My motivation for this poll was simple. I believe that DWF support in MapGuide is now a technical burden that is not worth carrying on.

This feature is terminal. You won't see any DWF-related enhancements (not from me anyways). Any DWF-related issues still open will most likely never be fixed. Because I doubt that anyone would be familiar enough with the underlying DWF toolkit library to keep maintaining this support as it stands.

Also, presumably this DWF support was originally put in as value proposition from Autodesk to integrate with AutoCAD and friends. Well, since they've officially bailed out at the beginning of this year, that is yet another reason I'm cold on DWF support in MapGuide. Given my dwindling free time on anything MapGuide related, I'd rather spend it (wherever I can) on making MapGuide a better GIS/WebMap server than trying to maintain support for technologies that Autodesk themselves have given up on.

And judging by these poll results, I would gather that you (the poll respondent) would mostly agree with my sentiments.