The History of MapGuide

January 28, 2009 By: Neal Niemiec

Until the mid- to late 1990s, GIS was confined to large workstations that could house both the data and the stand-alone software that made the end product of GIS (which was often a hard-copy map). However, it was at this time that the Internet and networks were also becoming more common, creating a population of users who had access to the World Wide Web.

GIS was slowly being adopted within the private sector through mainstream IT departments, but had already become a mature implementation in governmental and academic organizations. Because government and academia needed to distribute maps to users who lacked expensive and proprietary GIS software, Web mapping was born.

A timeline of milestones in Web mapping.

From Past to Present

It was at this time, in 1995, that Argus Technologies released Argus MapGuide. In the fall of 1996, Autodesk (www.autodesk.com) acquired Argus Technologies, and within a few months the first release under the Autodesk brand was introduced as Autodesk MapGuide 2.0. Software releases of this MapGuide product continued, and the current release of this architecture is known as MapGuide 6.5.

Some features in the current release of MapGuide grew out of the limitations placed on users restricted to slow Internet speeds, such as those using the dial-up connections common in the mid-1990s. Version 6.5 was also shaped by users' need to access large amounts of data, and to integrate computer-aided design (CAD) with traditional GIS data: the software can natively read DWG files, as well as SHP file data. MapGuide 6.5 also utilizes an Autodesk proprietary format — SDF — to help improve performance on larger datasets.

Because it was architected for limited Internet speeds, MapGuide 6.5 uses an activeX control that users install as a thin client, enabling them to locally share some of the map data processing with the MapGuide 6.5 server. This can help conserve processing cycles on a server while distributing data to a large number of users. MapGuide 6.5 also serves a vector map file to the user, rather than the traditional raster-based images seen in many Web mapping applications.

A diagram of the architecture for MapGuide 6.5.

To create a MapGuide 6.5 Web site a developer would use the stand-alone authoring tool, HTML, Javascript, and the MapGuide API offered by the client-side plug-in. The following diagram shows the architecture for MapGuide 6.5, which is limited to installation on a Microsoft Windows Server operating system, using Microsoft Internet Information Services for the Web server and Microsoft Internet Explorer for browsing the final Web map.