MapGuide Open Source Report 2008

From http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/OSGeoAnnualReport2008 --

MapGuide Open Source Annual Report 2008

 * Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
 * Contact name: Robert Bray, PSC Chair

Key Accomplishments

 * Released MapGuide Open Source 2.0.0 in late February. This was a significant release of new functionality, including:
 * Incorporation of DM Solution's Fusion technology and Open Layers.
 * Introduction of an AGG based Renderer that significantly improves anti-aliasing and overall map quality.
 * A new symbology engine that supports defining and using data driven cartographic point, line, and area styles.
 * Released MapGuide Open Source 2.0.1 in the middle of May.
 * Added three committers from the community, Jackie Ng (Feb 09), Kenneth Skovhede (May 08), and Jason Birch (Nov 08).
 * Added Kenneth Skovhede to the MapGuide Project Steering Comittee.
 * With Kenneth's support, added MapGuide Maestro (formerly Map Studio Open Source) to the MapGuide Open Source project. Maestro is a full featured authoring application for MapGuide that makes it much easier to create and manage Data Sources, Layers, Maps, and Web Layouts for MapGuide Open Source.
 * Released MapGuide Open Source 2.0.2 in September in conjunction with FOSS4G 2008.
 * With funding from Autodesk and assistance from Camptocamp the first MapGuide Open Source Live CD was also released in September.
 * Participated in FOSS4G, with a Lab on MapGuide Open Source and a couple of Presentations.
 * A chapter on MapGuide Open Source has been published in the Springer book Open Source Approaches to Spatial Data Handling edited by G. Brent Hall and Michael G. Leahy. ISBN: 978-3-540-74830-4.

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.
 * A public build system for MapGuide would provide the community information on the state of trunk and access to daily builds of trunk. Work on this is in progress, but obviously community help and support would be much appreciated.
 * There has been some improvement to the Linux based builds of MapGuide and FDO, however they remain more difficult than they should be.

Opportunities to Help
All contributions and help is welcome, but in particular:


 * Contributions to the website navigation and site structure.
 * Development of a getting started tutorial.
 * Help with the public build system, installers, and Linux build system.
 * Additional testing and quality bug reports.

Outlook for 2009
The outlook for the MapGuide Open Source project in 2009 and beyond is very bright. From a technology standpoint MapGuide Open Source 2.0 is a sound platform for developing sophisticated web-mapping applications. Community contribution to the core of the MapGuide Open Source codebase is on the rise, which will lead directly to an even more capable, mature, and open platform in the future.