Tuesday 11 September 2012

MapGuide Open Source 2.4 RC2 released

Get all the information and downloads from here

This release includes some AJAX viewer fixes and usability improvements to Fusion.

Any Fusion widget that uses a digitizer (eg. Measure, Redline), now takes advantage of the MapMessage component to "visually" tell you that digitization is in process. Previously the MapMessage component was only used for the QuickPlot widget, which is really an inefficient use for a component which has great utility in relaying notifications and messages to the user.

For example, here's what the viewer looks like during a "Select Radius" operation.


And here's how the viewer looks, when the Measure widget is active.


You get the idea.

But the main feature of the RC2 release is the improved documentation. Not only is the MapGuide API documentation gotten a touch up, but this release also includes for the first time ever: API documentation for Fusion!


For the longest time, not only did the Fusion build files not actually build the documentation (it's only built on certain steps that the normal MapGuide build process doesn't use), but the Fusion source itself was not annotated in a NaturalDocs-friendly manner, making the resulting generated documentation difficult to comprehend.

We've combed through the core and widgets to put at least basic class and method descriptions in the main APIs you would be working with in Fusion. The end result, is something that's passable for this release (some documentation is better than no documentation), but could definitely do with some improvement in the content department for future releases.

Linux builds of RC2 will follow shortly.

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