Updated MapGuide Developer's Guide

[jng]

The original MapGuide Developer's Guide has several problems associated with it:

1. It used PHP in all its code samples. The problem is if you didn't know PHP, but knew .net or Java then the actual document does not really help.

2. The document is essentially a blob, making it unsuitable for storage under source control as changes cannot be tracked.

3. The document does not exist in source form (related to point 2). Having the document source allows us to "compile" it into multiple different forms (html, pdf, chm, etc) and integrate it as part of the build process

4. The document has evidently not been updated in a while to reflect the addition of newer MapGuide APIs and the addition of Fusion and support in OpenLayers

As a first phase, the content of the devguide should be placed into document source form (current thinking is either powerful like LaTeX or something simpler like sphinx (​http://sphinx.pocoo.org))

With the second phase being updating the existing PHP devguide samples to match current APIs.

The third phase would be to port this updated PHP sample to Java and .net while respecting the development style of the respective languages.

The final phase would be to update the devguide content and associated samples with usage examples of newer APIs and examples involving fusion and OpenLayers.

Once in place, the devguide content and examples should be regularly updated as newer MapGuide APIs are introduced.

[tomfukushima]

I tried to get the source of the document a while back but was unsuccessful. I think that the best thing to do would be to extract the contents from the PDF and start with that.