I saw that Brian Lantz has recently been named as a Leader in the "Thrill of Invention" category on the Fast 50 list ( <http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_02/> http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_02/). "Brian helped create MapInfo's Homeland Security Program, which is designed to help government agencies leverage location intelligence to protect the nation's people and assets. Organizations such as The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), The New York City Police Department and United States Border Patrol use MapInfo for fast and efficient response and recovery efforts." Brian deserves the Leadership nomination as he has had to endure a battle for mindshare for many years now. But there are issues that confound MapInfo and its wider participation in our governmental GIS systems. You may want to take a look at the Commercial Joint Mapping Tool Kit just for fun... <http://www.cjmtk.com/about_cjmtk.html> http://www.cjmtk.com/about_cjmtk.html. In the near future, MapInfo 8.0 is in the pipe and is rumored to be based on MapX.NET, a "next" generation of COM technology championed by Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/net/ <http://www.microsoft.com/net/> ). The CJMTK has tapped COM technology as the preferred design. Will MapInfo Professional 8.0 developers gain any momentum by this shift? "Although there are several different object-component standards (COM, JavaBean, and CORBA), Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) has emerged as the most viable technology for developing high-performance, interactive desktop and client/server applications. COM is well-defined and mature, is understood reasonably well, is prevalent in the developer community, and has excellent supporting materials (books, training resources, Integrated Development Environments [IDE], and modeling languages [e.g., UML, the Unified Modeling Language]). Because COM is a binary specification, it delivers good performance and is secure", CJMTK. My quest for insight..... Many years ago when MapInfo first started building MapX and we were still in the hunting mode for what to invest our future in, we also looked at the very early precursor of ESRI's ArcObjects design, then known as MapObjects. In those early days of discovery of what COM was all about, I was enlightened in that I found that many of the command constructs required to drive MapX also were essentially identical to those in MapObjects. MapObjects is still available but essentially unsupported and replaced by ArcObjects. So, say your company could out-class and perform a defacto COM module, lets suggest the vector edit engine in the nominated "tool kit" above, Could that superior component replace the original one? Seems so simple? If so, then competition could drive the "open GIS" offerings. More generally, is there any benefit to having a MapInfo design based not in COM but in NET? Thanks for your thoughts.... MidNight Mapper aka neil
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