Geospatial - GISGoogle earth / mapsVirtual Earth

MapBuilder surrenders ... another

It is painful to see interesting projects tear their clothes and accept that they retire ... just a few days ago We made mention Of the weakness of projects not associated with an aggressive marketing plan that will make it sustainable.

Map builder

It is not exactly the case of MapBuilder, a project that was born in December of 2003, with good results and that has announced that they will release a final stable version but that they will not be able to continue with the project the way they have been doing it. Its greatest integration was with OpenLayers, Who do seem to understand the business; Although now for MapBuilder is not so easy to follow the pace of development.

So making a correction, it is not that they throw the towel, rather they change of model of collaboration leaving to OpenLayers the role in order of a better advantage of resources.

The fact that toward Mapbuilder does well

The biggest achievement of this project was to create an application under license LGPL that allowed without much complication to create services of client maps for Internet under transformation and XML rendering under an AJAX environment. According to many, its simplified Model-View-Controller (MVC) model is relatively easy to use but above all with very little requirement for the server.

  • Map services can include GML, WFS, GeoRSS, and also Google Maps. But with its integration into OpenLayers can lead to also connect with Yahoo, Virtual Earth and Multimap
  • It has support for the publication of data via WFS ... including transactional services (WFS-T)
  • Services can be built using Web Map Context (WMC) and Open Web Services Context.
  • It is compatible with several OGC standards and is a project that OSGeo He considered a graduate

There are Some examplesplos very well mounted, because it had managed to integrate its functionality with some versions of Firefox (somewhat old), Internet Explorer and Mozilla ... so that its limitation was not keeping track of the crazy modifications of Google and Microsoft to their browsers, in the end We landed on the road with the sad reality:

“It is difficult for someone to develop something good, for free”, not because it is not possible, but because everything in this life costs money… even time.

The most serious problem is that like this application there are several, so that with much doubt and regret we remain in the hope that someone will take it back… even if it has to be someone so bad That finishes commercializing it.

It is clear that the version of MapBuilder will possibly be the last one, although from the side of OpenLayers it will be possible to give more sustainable continuity.

Via: James Fee

Golgi Alvarez

Writer, researcher, specialist in Land Management Models. He has participated in the conceptualization and implementation of models such as: National Property Administration System SINAP in Honduras, Management Model of Joint Municipalities in Honduras, Integrated Cadastre-Registry Management Model in Nicaragua, Territory Administration System SAT in Colombia . Editor of the Geofumadas knowledge blog since 2007 and creator of the AulaGEO Academy that includes more than 100 courses on GIS - CAD - BIM - Digital Twins topics.

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3 Comments

  1. Well, reading the original notification in the MapBuilder page, it seems that it is not that they have surrendered, but have decided to merge with Open Layers, a project with which they shared code, developers and a good number of users for a couple of years. In fact the relationship between both projects was very large and MapBuilder had chosen OpenLayers as a rendering engine. And I say that rather it is a fusion between two projects, rather than the failure of one of them, because the majority of developers of MapBuilder parce that will be integrated in OpenLayers.

    Finally, I don't think those who market software are "bad", it's just a different production model.

    All the best

  2. Well ... a friend who is in an IDE course in France, and who has a project built on Map Builder tells me that his instructors have mentioned that MapBuilder will continue ... and that he does not believe the first post he reads.

    How lucky I am to be caught like this ... anyway, thanks for the clarification ... I have made some corrections to the original point of view

  3. Mmm I do not agree at all.

    If one reads Cameron's announcement regarding MapBuilder's withdrawal, it sees that it is not exactly a lost battle but rather a re-deployment of efforts.

    MapBuilder had already been sharing code with OpenLayers for a while and both developer communities had been working together from Laussane's FOSS4G (2006). So, if you were collaborating, sharing code and Openlayers is acquiring a larger base of developers, it is more than logical for the MapBuilder community to join OpenLayers.

    I believe that in any case it is a success for OSGeo to be able to have under these two projects coverage because it has given the people of MapBuilder confidence to work in OL. It is worth reading the thread of conversation in the general list of OSGeo where I think it is better appreciated all this.

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