MapGuide Open Source Annual Report 2007

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
• Contact name: Robert Bray, PSC Chair

Key Accomplishments

• Completed all milestones toward the release of MapGuide Open Source 2.0 - Beta 2 Released mid-December.
  • Incorporates the Fusion technology from DM Solutions which represents the biggest source code donation from the community to date. Fusion uses Open Layers at it's core and provides tremendous flexibilty for application and web developers.
  • Support for the AGG Renderer significantly improves anti-aliasing and overall map quality.
  • The complete roadmap and features of 2.0 can be found here: ​http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/milestone/2.0.
• MapStudio Open Source makes its debut. MapStudio OS is a desktop application for authoring and configuring MapGuide Open Source related data. MapStudio OS was developed independently of the MapGuide Open Source project and is available here: ​http://code.google.com/p/mapstudioos.
• MapGuide Open Source 1.2.0 Released - September 4, 2007
  • The complete roadmap and features of 1.2 can be found here: ​http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/milestone/1.2.
• MapGuide Graduates Incubation - March 5, 2007
  • In February the MapGuide project met all of the requirements for OSGeo incubation and graduated the incubation process.
• MapGuide Open Source 1.1.0 Released - January 22, 2007

Areas for Improvement

• While community contribution to the project is growing, most of those contributions are still on the periphery of the project. The core development on the MapGuide project is still primarily fueled by developers at Autodesk. The project really needs developers from the communinity actively working on some of the core components.
• Getting started with MapGuide is still more difficult than it needs to be. Improvements to the authoring tools (Web Studio / Map Studio) and a tutorial would go a long way to improving this experience.
• A public build system for MapGuide would provide the community information on the state of trunk and access to daily builds of trunk.
• Linux based builds of MapGuide and FDO remain more difficult than they should be. Some effort was put into an FGS installer but more work is required to the build systems of both FDO and MapGuide to make FGS fully viable.
• Website navigation is still more difficult than it should be. The project needs to do some reconcilliation of what is in Drupal vs what is in Trac, and come up with a plan and resources to make the site easier to navigate and use. It would also be beneficial to get the doxygen API documentation available directly from Trac.

Opportunities to Help

All contributions and help is welcome, but in particular:

• Contributions to the website navigation and site structure.
• Contributions to the help and documentation, in particular a getting started tutorial.
• Help with the Linux build system and completing the FGS package work.
• Additional testing and quality bug reports.

Outlook for 2008

The outlook for the MapGuide Open Source project in 2008 and beyond is very bright. From a technology standpoint MapGuide Open Source 2.0 will be released early in 2008. With the new AGG renderer and incorporation of Fusion we anticipate broad adoption of 2.0. Community contribution continues to grow at a steady pace, and we believe the 2.0 release will spark even more enthusiasm and collaboration. Finally with a little effort and support we believe the number of external developers contributing to the core code base will start to increase.