Performance Tip for Mapguide Tiled layers with Fusion

Internally, Fusion uses OpenLayers to display maps. By default, titled maps use a buffer factor of 2

http://dev.openlayers.org/docs/files/OpenLayers/Layer/Grid-js.html#OpenLayers.Layer.Grid.buffer

This buffer setting determines how many off screen tiles are loaded, you can tweak this option using the following syntax in your ApplicationDefinition.xml

<Map>
               <Type>MapGuide</Type>
                <SingleTile>false</SingleTile>
                <Extension>
                        <ResourceId>Library:// .....</ResourceId>
                        <Options>
                            <buffer>0</buffer>                               
                        </Options>                       
                </Extension>
</Map>

Setting buffer:0 means that only the initially visible tiles are loaded, which means as you pan, the tiles are loaded as required

MapGuide: Using Fusion with Selection Events (aka reports)

Sometimes, you just want to do simple things and it seems frustrating. I was
frustrated and I solved it, here's my contribution back!

Having come into the geo-spatial world with Autodesk MapGuide in the 6.x series (aka classic),
the world was a lot simpler. The MapGuide Open Source Classic (or
Basic Viewer) made things easy to make a url launch from a selection. Fusion is a
little different, here's some pointers :)

MapGuide Fusion (aka flexible layouts) is a bit more technical to use, but is also
far more powerful, being based on OpenLayers.

If you want to launch a report, or popup window form a selection you need to
register an event to handle the selection.

The answer is pretty simple, as this mailing list post explains.

It's all you need to know to get started and hacking.

If it doesn't work, flip into Firefox, with Firebug enabled and dump
the sel inside the function selectionCallback(sel) and add a line to
window.console.info(sel); and see what your dealing with!

Learning by trying is the best way to learn

MapGuide Central for a good starting point for playhing with MapGuide, Openlayers and Fusion.

A must see presentation about the business of software

Just a quick post, Paul Ramsey made a brilliant presentation at FOSS4G 2009 Keynote

If you work in the software industry, you should really watch this...

FOSS4G was really an amazing conference

CF9 Rocks but CFMAP would be better with Openlayers

I've just been watching the CFMeetup about CF9, I am super impressed with what the have done.

One thing which bugs me with the current beta, is the CFMAP tag which is directly tied to Google Maps.

I've been using Openlayers for a while now and I am honestly rather suprised that Adobe has chosen to support only google maps.

This is problematic as there are a lot of restrictions on what you can do with Google Maps, ie using it with password protected sites and the like.

Openlayers supports a wide range of different mapping providers and I really think it would be better to add support via openlayers, mainly because you get to program to an API which is cross provider.

It sucks if you start a project with google maps and then you hit licensing restrictions ( which i think a lotta people ignore anyway) and have to move away from google maps.

If your doing anything beyond simplely showing a maps, your going to be writing some custom javascript and it you use the google maps api, you can't easily switch because your tied to the google api.

If you use openlayers, you can switch mapping providers ****really**** easily.

Check out this demo with lots of different commercial providers and the other examples. Note the exmaples

I filed an enhancement request on the new CF9 bug db

Introducing Explore Australia

After several years of work, I am happy to announce that Explore Australia is now live on the web.

Explore Australia is an interactive travel guide which covers over 700 different tourist towns and regions.

The site was built using Coldfusion 8, Model Glue, MapGuide Open Source, Oracle XE, jQuery & Openlayers and runs on Ubuntu via Amazon Web Services.

This project wouldn't of been possible with out the hard work of all the wonderful developers who contribute their time into these open source projects. I've learnt a lot and managed to contribute bits back myself.

Enjoy!

XUL Profiler Addon profiles your Javascript too

Check it out, useful for anyone doing stuff with javascript (not just XUL)!

easily confirm your performance hunches

http://blog.yoono.com/blog/2008/12/download-yoono-xulprofiler/

Interestingly, Facebook is running load most of the time..

GITA GIS Technology Workshops 11th, 13th Nov 2008

I will presenting at the Sydney (PDF) and Melbourne (PDF) legs of GITA's GIS Technology Workshops next week.

There are two workshops, Automated CAD & GIS integration for better asset data management and Open Source Geospatial: How Can Your Organisation Take Advantage?

The speaking lineup includes Andrew Bashfield, Steve De Rosayro, Omar Awny, Jody Garnett, Milton Loftberg & Cameron Shorter.

I am involved in the Open Source Geospatial workshop and will be presenting a Case Study: Open Source Deployment at Ballarat University and Explore Australia.

Explaining how Ennoble leveraged MapGuide Open Source and OpenLayers on these projects to deliver flexible, scaleable, low cost solutions, I'll also be talking about some of our experiences and benefits that come from using open source from a business perspective.

It's more like cooking dinner with a great selection of fresh produce rather than settling for a frozen dinner!

Autodesk organised a similar workshop up on the Gold Coast a few months ago and it was really interesting day. Milton Loftberg's practical demonstration of MapGuide, which included my favorite moment when one of the audience, an ESRI user was completely jaw-dropped at the speed which a new MapGuide map was opened and displayed.

Sorry I haven't blogged this earlier as I know it's late notice, but I hope to see you there.

I always enjoy meeting people who read my blog, so if you are coming along say hello!

A quick speed tip for my Mapguide Tiler

Depending on the speed of you map when your using my OpenLayers based MapGuide tiling tool, the browser might actually be the bottle neck.

I did a little experiment today, it involves using google chrome and adding
some css to the page to stop the browser rendering the tiles.

Simply add the following style definition to the tiler script

<style type="text/css"> img {display:none;} </style>

This speeds up things quite a lot, especially when you already have some of the cache already seeded.

It also helps to use multiple urls to avoid the browser limitations of http connections per host name.

Fighting page zoom with tiled maps

I like the automatic page zoom with Firefox 3, it rocks, for text. It kinda sucks with images as they get stretched and it looks rubbish and blurred. This is a problem with tiled maps, as they just shouldn't be scaled like that.

There are a few workarounds out there but none seem great. I would like to be able to disable page zoom, or even better would be detecting the page zoom and then maybe decreasing the tile grid size so that when the tiles are zoomed to match the screen resolution, they actually end up at the same resolution.

Can anyone shine some light on this issue?