Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise Developer

[#1]

Hi,
We are contemplating the jump to Mapguide Enterprise from 6.5 or simply moving to another technology altogether( Google maps, arcIMS).
1) Is mapguide enterprise really as wonderful as its made out to be and what have been some of the experiences of some of you developers in this forum? We are heavily invested in cold fusion and this is going to be a lot of rework for us, so might as well start out re-evaluation of potential applications with a clean slate.
2) Are there any developers out there that will do some consulting work and help with the initial migration if we choose to go with Enterprise?

Thanks!

[#2]

Hello,
MapGuide Enterprise is obviously brand new so there is not a lot of
experience on this product by the community yet. In fact, I'm not even sure
if it is shipping to customers yet. Some of us are working with it from the
Autodesk Developer Network site and some of us have also been working with
it since the beta releases. MapGuide Open Source (on which MapGuide
Enterprise is based) has been around a bit longer and there have been some
development activities around that project. See the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation web site at www.OSGeo.org for more information. There are also
some demo sites listed under the MapGuide project that you can take a look
at.

The new MapGuide is obviously a young product and not as mature as some of
the others out there but has a huge amount of potential, especially given
it's current functionality set and the fact that the core is now open
source. As a user, it would prudent of you to go ahead and evaluate the
alternatives that exist and make the best decision you can based on your
functional requirements. Keep in mind that Google Maps and Google Earth are
not full solutions. You can use their interfaces for your clients, but you
would still need a back-end spatial server to drive your own data.

Even though you are heavily invested in ColdFusion, you may not have to
re-tool all of that existing code. MapGuide 6.5 and ColdFusion have always
been completely independent of one another and in many cases you will be
able to reuse your CF reports, etc. while only modifying the code where you
are hooking to or from the MapGuide API. The place where a complete
re-write will be necessary is any MapGuide 6.5 API code that you might
have - there is simply no migration path for this code given the radical
differences between the architectures of the old and new MapGuide's.

Yes, there are developers that will do consulting around MapGuide 6.5 to
MapGuide Enterprise/Open migrations. My company is one of them. Please see
our web site for more information and demos of some MapGuide Open Source
sites.


--
Andy Morsell, P.E.
Spatial Integrators, Inc.
http://www.SpatialGIS.com

wrote in message news:5249803@discussion.autodesk.com...
Hi,
We are contemplating the jump to Mapguide Enterprise from 6.5 or simply
moving to another technology altogether( Google maps, arcIMS).
1) Is mapguide enterprise really as wonderful as its made out to be and what
have been some of the experiences of some of you developers in this forum?
We are heavily invested in cold fusion and this is going to be a lot of
rework for us, so might as well start out re-evaluation of potential
applications with a clean slate.
2) Are there any developers out there that will do some consulting work and
help with the initial migration if we choose to go with Enterprise?

Thanks!