Yes, the ActiveX viewer format is called DWF, and it is a format
Microsoft intends to support
in the next version of Windows (called XPS I think?). Unfortunately, to
use it would require some
form of deployment to the client machine, until it is standard on all
machines.
With Silverlight, this poses problems, as it runs in a sandbox, and thus
cannot access or install
the required component. It might be possible to develop a completely
managed DWF library,
and that would work, but that would require some heavy work.
And yes, you are spot on with your observations on tradeoffs :).
Regards, Kenneth Skovhede, GEOGRAF A/S
Carl Jokl skrev:
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.
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