The apt-get dream is getting closer

As some of you already know, a new MapGuide LiveDVD is in the works, to be made available at FOSS4G 2010

Unlike the previous attempt, what excites me about this LiveDVD release is the surrounding work on having functional out-of-the-box binaries for Ubuntu Linux!

Building mapguide from source in linux has been a major source of pain and frustration and it is nice to have pre-built binaries to avoid all that mess.

There's still some hurdles to overcome, but sudo apt-get install mapguideopensource is that much closer to reality.

On a sidenote: full credit to Trevor Wekel from OTX Systems for spearheading this initiative. Please consider donating to support some of his other initiatives, among which is to have a stable GDAL raster provider, which is something we could all do with.

More installer flexibility in MapGuide Open Source 2.2

The (soon to be beta) release of MapGuide Open Source 2.2 will include an even more flexible installation experience.

In addition to configurable IIS web sites, you also get:

Configurable port numbers

Configurable virtual directory name and web server port (for Apache)

Configurable virtual directory name for IIS

All these changes ultimately make it easier to install 2.2 alongside an existing 2.1 or earlier release, by making the common points of conflict all configurable.

Side-by-side installation is not a supported scenario, but at least these changes will make it easier for you should you choose to take that path.

Look familiar?

Now where have I seen this before? :D

New Maestro Feature: Load Procedures!

If a picture is worth a thousand words. Then this post is worth 5000 :D

You may notice that some of the UI elements in the Transformation section are disabled. That's because these features are not supported in Maestro, and are ignored when the load procedure is executed.

The motivation for Load Procedure support was simply to satisfy the use case of "quick and dirty" loading of SDF/SHP files into MapGuide with default (monochromatic) layer styles.

I will be posting a 2.1 preview build soon that will have this and much more

FDO Toolbox is dead. Long live FDO Toolbox

This post is an official announcement that development of FDO Toolbox will be winding down.

The reasons for winding down are three-fold:

1. My original goals of FDO Toolbox have been met. With the exception of certain esoteric bits of the FDO API, my primary design goal of FDO Toolbox being a "front-end" to the FDO API has been effectively met.

2. I am taking over from Kenneth Skovhede as the primary maintainer of MapGuide Maestro.

3. Now being the primary maintainer, Maestro is now my primary focus. My long-term vision for Maestro is to have the data creation, querying, analysis and ETL capabilities of FDO Toolbox in addition to the publishing capabilities of Maestro, forming the ultimate tool for geospatial data. So to this end, you will see many parts of FDO Toolbox being merged into future releases of Maestro. So in a way FDO Toolbox will live on as part of the Maestro project.

Version 1.0 of FDO Toolbox, which will have the final version of FDO 3.5.0 will be the final release. After that, I'll be moving on full-time (my free time that is :D) to the MapGuide and Maestro projects and as a result, you'll be seeing more Maestro-related bloggery in the future.

R.I.P. FDO Toolbox (2008-2010)

FDO Toolbox v0.9.3

Here's a small point release with the following changes:

• Connections are now lazily initialized. That 100+ feature class ArcSDE schema will only take 5 minutes to load when you expand the connection node for the first time. All created connections are now initially collapsed.

• FDO has been upgraded to 3.5.0 RC1. The most notable feature of FDO 3.5.0 is the brand new PostGIS provider that is built from the same core as the other RDBMS providers. It is strongly recommended to use this provider (OSGeo.PostgreSQL) over the existing PostGIS provider (OSGeo.PostGIS). The existing provider is still included, but it should be considered deprecated and working with PostGIS data stores with this provider is discouraged. Please note that the express connection option still uses the old provider. You will have to use the generic connection method for the new PostGIS provider.

Download

Report bugs / feature requests

Coming soon to MapGuide Open Source 2.2

The problem stuck out like a sore thumb for the past 2 years, but as of the next release of MapGuide Open Source, Windows Server 2003 users can now choose the web site they want to install the MapGuide Web Extensions to!

Why did it take so long? Doing the custom action in .net would've been a piece of cake, but since we cannot afford the luxury of assuming the .net Framework as a mandatory requirement, we had to resort to doing the custom action in C++, which is no walk in the park. Thankfully, wcautil and IMSAdminBase provided the required tools to make this possible! Also, real world™ priorities had stolen whatever time I had to tackle this problem, until now.

Note that this applies to IIS6 only, as IIS7 uses a totally different form of configuration although we can still apparently use the same IMSAdminBase COM API, so if time/resource permitting I may be able to give IIS7 the same loving treatment.