Perhaps I am missing something here but my understanding of the latest versions of MapGuide was that it still supports the ActiveX based viewer as well as the new AJAX viewer, is this correct?
If this is correct then I would ask the question of how the ActiveX viewer works when interacting with the MapGuide Enterprise / Open Source framework? Looking at things from a high level I thought this would just be a matter of creating a replacement viewer for the ActiveX component which behaved and operated like the ActiveX viewer but was implemented using a different technology. I don't mean to imply that this is a trivial task by any means just that if the ActiveX viewer still works then there ought to be scope for having another component plug into the functionality that powers the ActiveX control. There is a tradeoff to be met here. The Ajax component is good and has advantages when it comes to compatibility and not requiring any pluggin to work but on the other hand it increaces the bandwith usage and can be sluggish when bandwidth gets constrained. The problem also pushes back to a fairly long standing argument of the virtues of Thick Client vs. Thin Client. The more work you can push onto the client the less work the server has to do. This can help the application scale better / handle higher volumes of users. The flip side is that it makes deployment on the client more complicated and may introduce client compatibility issues. For these reasons I don't think that the benefit of having both thick(er) client and thin(er) versions of the viewer can be disregarded. I think some kind of viewer which uses less bandwith and renders on the client side whether it be the existing ActiveX control or something else which does the same thing is important to have. This provides and important alternative for situations where the Ajax viewer performs poorly. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Silverlight-Moonlight-Viewer-tp18128053p18131076.html Sent from the MapGuide Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ mapguide-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users
