Announcing: MapGuide Open Source 4.0 Preview 3

Here is the long awaited third preview release of MapGuide Open Source 4.0.

Refer to the release notes for download links and an overview of what's new and change since the last preview release.

For MapGuide users on Linux who use Java, you will be glad to hear that Java support is back and fully operational with this release (no more 403 errors from Tomcat). Restoring Java support on Linux came at a small price, we now no longer ship MapGuideApi.jar as the Java wrapper to the MapGuide API. We now only ship MapGuideApiEx.jar which has been in all MapGuide Open Source releases since 2.5 and this wrapper fixes most of the "cruftiness" of the original Java wrapper as described in this RFC where it was first introduced.

For those who like to swap the bundled GDAL dll on windows with a version with an expanded suite of raster/vector driver support, this release will make this process more seamless:

• Our internal GDAL version is now 2.4.4, the latest in the 2.x series.
• Our internal xalan/xerces dlls now have a "fdo" suffix in their dll name, so you are no longer forced to overwrite these dlls when overlaying an external GDAL dll from gisinternals and introduce potential instability as a result.
• All of our FDO providers that link to GDAL/OGR now only use their C API to avoid any potential ABI incompatibilities from replacing our internal GDAL dll with an external one that may not be built with the same MSVC compiler version as ours.

Other than that, Preview 3 is mostly a roll up of fixes to MapGuide/FDO since the last preview release to tide things over while work is still ongoing to support PHP7 in our MapGuide API to clear the obstacle to a final 4.0 release.

But before then, as of this release I will be taking a short break from all things open source. I am mildly burned out all things considered and a good solid month or two away from all things open source should hopefully be enough time to recharge the batteries.