Slashgeo

Spatially Adjusted blogs about open source solutions beginning to be serious competition to ArcGIS Server. From the entry: "When asked why they felt this way, they all said it was because they have invested so much in their web clients that they no longer needed to be tied to ESRI Server products and their added cost. [...] As one person said to me, “ArcIMS really hasn’t changed in the past 3 years, so why should I pay maintenance on such a product? I’m sure the new wizard based map creation back end will be helpful to some, but it doesn’t add anything to my development work flows.”"

The OSGeo mailing list announced the maintenance release of MapServer 4.10.1. The changelog is found here. Here's how the popular open source webmapping application is described on the OSGeo website: "MapServer is an open source development environment for building spatially-enabled web mapping applications and services. It is fast, flexible, reliable and can be integratated into just about any GIS environment. Originally developed at the University of Minnesota, MapServer is now maintained by developers around the world."

I'd like your opinion on webmapping technology choice. The context is rather simple, my small team will produce a small prototype which must publish geospatial data on a website. The data is already processed and georeferenced. This is a tiny project but we want to choose the best long term webmapping solution possible. When I asked an internal (to the Canadian Government) mailing list about this, I surprisingly received numerous (and sometimes passionate) answers claiming either MapServer or MapGuide Open Source was best. I unexpectedly stumbled onto a sensible topic! From what I've been told, MapServer is fast, reliable, mature while MapGuide OS is easy to use and configure, modern (e.g. AJAX) and has higher scalability. Other opinions/facts for and against MapServer or MapGuide OS were shared along with several websites which demonstrate those technologies. Our webmapping server will run on Debian, therefore excluding ESRI's ArcIMS. Additionally, MapGuide is already operationally supported in my organization, this obviously favors MapGuide OS but does not exclude MapServer if it's really the best option! To be honest, I haven't took the time yet to do a complete assessment of the two avenues. That said, what's your opinion? Thanks!

Fernando Quadro writes "Who is initiating in the development of space solutions is very common the following questioning: Which server of maps is best? MapServer or GeoServer? Looking for to answer this question, I wrote an article showing some of the differences between MapServer and GeoServer." Fernando's points are interesting, I invite readers to see the previous story on choosing between MapServer and MapGuide Open Source and read the informative comments. I also copied a few related stories below.

The Fuzzy Tolerance blog notes a pretty interesting, but unofficial observation. From their summary : "If you’ve got people on ArcIMS projects, it’s probably time to bail if it’s early or say “that and no more” and stop investing time and money in it. If you’re an ESRI-only shop, snuggle up with a dozen or so ArcObjects diagrams and a box of tissues. If not, there are a lot of great open source solutions you can try. But either way, every dollar you spend today on an ArcIMS project will mean two dollars spent in a year or so converting it to something else."

This information comes from observations noticed at the ESRI developer summit this year. Head on over to the Fuzzy Tolerance blog to get an in depth report about these observations.