Web mapping has offered organisations the chance to make valuable corporate geospatial data available to a much broader group of users – and business applications – than just the people that create and or manage that data.
It is not uncommon for such organisations to spend most of the budget allocated to a web mapping system on just getting the technology functional at a basic level. This reduces the time and money available to create the associated query and other system interfaces – which are the really important aspects of getting the system up and running.
Consequently, the implementation budget is often exceeded. The delivery of a business solution is therefore hamstrung or delayed.
In relatively recent times, an increasingly broad user population browses the internet and expects to see a map as a by-product of many web searches. Ten years ago this was at the least expensive, and often difficult if not impossible. This change in expectation is largely due to free services from organisations such as Sensis, Google, Yahoo – and also to the free software available from open source communities such as the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
These types of issues fuel the philosophy behind Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise and its cousin, MapGuide Open Source. Based on the same ‘DNA’ (they share common core code), these variants provide strong out-of-the-box functionality, a modern IT standardsbased platform, and a distribution and support model common in the Open Source world.
MapGuide Basics
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise is based on MapGuide Open Source, from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. It provides all the advantages of open source technology with the added security of an application that is supported by Autodesk. Either way, you benefit from the efforts of hundreds of software developers in the broader geospatial community.
To the end user, MapGuide delivers a functional user interface, supporting web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. There is also a choice of AJAX or DWF delivery format.
Autodesk MapGuide Studio is a separate product that works equally well with either MapGuide Open Source or Enterprise. It is designed to enable the administrator to configure and preview the data, layers, layouts, symbology, and the application itself.
A developer can choose a .NET, PHP, or Java development platform, enabling very sophisticated applications using standard IT languages, protocols and methods.
From a corporate standpoint, you can choose Linux or Windows as the operating system – which will of course influence the development choices available.
MapGuide works with multiple native data types and formats. Data from Autodesk software such as AutoCAD Map 3D and AutoCAD Civil 3D can be simultaneously displayed with data from multiple popular GIS data sources using the Open Source Feature Data Objects technology. Supported FDO data sources include Oracle, Microsoft, ESRI, and a number of raster formats. The Open Source community itself has contributed strongly in this area, with the majority of the FDO providers being common to both MapGuide Enterprise and Open Source.
To help you deploy geospatial applications on the web, Autodesk MagGuide Enterprise includes a choice of IIS or Apache web servers, with support for .NET, PHP, and Java components. The installer can automatically configure the web and application servers, or you can choose to install individual components that suit your own system’s custom requirements.
What’s New?
MapGuide Enterprise 2008 and MapGuide Open Source 1.2 deliver a number of key enhancements and new features.
MapGuide 6.5 has been used as a performance benchmark for MapGuide Enterprise 2008, which is showing the benefits. For example, the generation/rendering of geospatial and design information is faster than ever.
A modern performance enhancement regime adopted by Web 2.0 based mapping systems (such as Google Maps) is to serve pre-prepared map tiles composed of relatively nonvolatile data. This is efficient and speedy because it saves CPU cycles, memory utilisation and the time taken to deliver maps to the end user. In other words, the mapping system is merely ‘shovelling’ existing tiles to the end user rather than generating the tiles and then delivering them across the network to the end user. MapGuide Enterprise 2008 is no exception. The administrator can set custom tile sizes to suit the application using MapGuide Studio or Open Source software (such as Open Layers or Facilities Map Tiling Engine from Websoft Developers, Inc).
Built in load balancing is another performance management feature of MapGuide Enterprise 2008. MapGuide’s MapAgent can ‘point to’ multiple mirrored MapGuide site servers enabling a (perhaps highly optioned and tuned) data server to provide data services to multiple, near simultaneous requests for data. Under this regime, session affinity is also maintained. This means that requests related to that particular MapGuide user will reliably find their way to the processing server and back.
MapGuide Enterprise Server manages resources such as data connections, layers and maps in a repository. These are known as ‘managed resources’. MapGuide Enterprise 2008 can now be configured to refer to folders of raster or vector files on any available disk drive.
Feature ‘joins’ via a foreign key relationship with a related table is now more streamlined. (This functionality is shared with AutoCAD Map 3D 2008.)
Co-ordinate systems can be overridden by default for data (feature) sources.
Any data feature’s content or structure – aspatial or spatial – can be previewed using MapGuide Studio 2008.
Have you thought of using Google Earth as a MapGuide Client? MapGuide Enterprise 2008 has been improved to enable the dynamic generation of KML or KMZ files based on existing map and layer definitions. This includes 3D extrusions – the ability to generate Google Earth overlays in 3D.
Some enhancements submitted by the Open Source developer community – such as ‘wheel mouse’ zoom support – have been rolled up into the commercial release.
MapGuide Enterprise 2008 has several cartographic enhancements. For example, it can specify line widths as attribute units. The ability to create and use user defined symbols for points, lines and labelling is also new in this release (see http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/ MapGuideRfc14). Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise 2008 is more developer friendly, with simplified API calls for common tasks such as accessing a map resource or a layer resource. It also makes it possible to programmatically select entities that are not currently visible within the view. This means that less code is required.
Necessary upgrades to FDO (to version 3.2.2), PHP (to version 5.2.1) and all Open Source updates from 1.1 and 1.2 have been included.
Of course, each of these features includes deeper capabilities that are not covered in this article. What can be said is that with its ability to integrate data from a variety of sources and business systems, Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise 2008 builds on a fundamental platform that acts as a simple yet powerful infrastructure intelligence tool. Thus it is delivering improved decision support to users across an organisation.
The Rise and Rise of Open Source: Fusion PreviewCreating MapGuide-based web mapping sites is straightforward, but what about requirements for non-standard ‘look and feel’? To meet this requirement, DM Solutions Group is contributing its ‘Fusion’ technology to the MapGuide Open Source project. ‘Fusion’ is the current project name for a new software developers’ kit that provides tools and templates to speed development of web mapping applications created with MapGuide Open Source and Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. Built primarily in JavaScript, Fusion provides a more flexible way to interact with MapGuide. What’s exciting about this technology is that it separates design and development tasks, allowing both non-spatial web designers and application developers to build rich web mapping sites quickly and easily. By using a growing suite of widgets and templates in this modular system, designers can focus on site aesthetics without having to write much code. And developers – even those with minimal programming experience – are free to focus on building powerful interactive AJAX applications. The results are Web 2.0- type applications that deliver a better interface for the user. This is the most significant contribution to the MapGuide Open Source project since its inception. A preview version of the Fusion technology is now available at http://mapguide. osgeo.org/download/releases/fusionpreview. You can see a demonstration of Fusion in action at: http://demo01.dmsolutions. ca/mapguide/fusion/demo/. This site also contains an FAQ and overview presentation. |
Milton Lofberg is Autodesk’s Solution Sales Consultant for the Geospatial division in Australia & New Zealand. For more information contact anz.marketing@mail.autodesk.com or visit www.autodesk.com.au.
This information has been supplied by Autodesk and its inclusion has been paid for.
