mapguide-react-layout dev diary part 25: There is a general purpose map viewer in there.

As I am tidying up the remaining loose ends for the upcoming 0.13 release, I am going to be giving the project a slight re-branding and revised mission statement after this release.

Because although I've touted the mapguide-react-layout project as a "modern map viewer for MapGuide", the fact of the matter is that only a small portion of the viewer codebase concerns integration with the services provided by MapGuide. The rest of the codebase builds on top of the already solid foundations provided OpenLayers, React and TypeScript that can also work with other web mapping servers and services.

I haven't come up with the specifics yet, but my current thoughts so far are:

• This project will be renamed to something else (name TBD)
• The npm package will have a different name. The mapguide-react-layout packages up to 0.13 will still remain on npm, but when the time is right I'll put a deprecation warning on mapguide-react-layout to let you all know about the new package and that you should migrate over to it.
• MapGuide-specific functionality and features of the viewer will be extracted and separated out. How this separation will be done TBD.

With this move, there is potential for some nice cross-pollination:

• I could pivot the vscode-map-preview extension to be based on this viewer (and its kitchen sink of built-in functionality) instead of raw OpenLayers strung together with other libraries and re-creating functionality I already take for granted in mapguide-react-layout.
• I'm parking my static map publishing idea for Maestro because the prospect of having a mapguide-react-layout viewer that need not necessarily have MapGuide Server dependencies is a more attractive proposition to build this idea on top of.
• There's opportunities for adoption of this viewer in other projects where the hard MapGuide Server dependency would've nixed such opportunities.

So when 0.13 finally drops, that will be the end of mapguide-react-layout in its current form. Not because I'm done with the project, but because it's time for this project to evolve.