This page is part of the MapGuide Future section, where ideas are proposed and refined before being turned into RFCs (or discarded). Visit the Future page to view more!

Overview

MapGuide contains all of the features of a great desktop mapping component: Data access, rudimentary GIS, stylization and more.

Although the current build is tightly bound to a server service, it would be useful to create a build profile that provided a desktop developer to quickly add spatial visualisation and interactivity to their application.

One roadblock to this would be the current reliance on Berkeley DBXML for the repository structure, as licensing for this module is too onerous for many desktop developers. There are several approaches that could be taken to work around this, such as accessing XML files in a directory structure or in a more openly-licensed XML database like Sedna, but perhaps it would be better to create a high-performance MGP-v2 format based on Sedna or SQLite. Not sure how this would work with managed resources though. They could be stored as blobs, but then they would have to be pushed to disk for access by FDO, and pulled back into the database when updated. Regardless of local storage, it would be great if developers also had the option of connecting natively to MapGuide Server instances as well.

It would also be nice if there was also a client-side application framework (A "thick-client" version of fusion) to complement the "desktop" version of MapGuide.

The Qt toolkit would be a nice foundation to base the optional GUI component of the MapGuide desktop SDK on. It is cross-platform, also written in C++, has a rich set of features and as of v4.5 (the current release) is licensed under the same terms as MapGuide itself (LGPL).