Preparing to Run the Examples

MapGuide includes a set of sample applications. Some of them correspond directly to chapters in this Developer’s Guide. These samples are designed to show one or two key concepts at a time.

Other sample applications are more full-featured. These are designed to show some of the capabilities of MapGuide. They are not discussed in detail in this guide, but they do build upon the basic concepts.

The sample applications are available on the installation CD. See the manual Installing Sample Data and Viewer Sample Application for details.

Complete examples are available from http://mapguide.osgeo.org/downloads.html. There are two required components: the source code and a package file for creating the web layouts. The Sheboygan sample data must also be installed.

NoteThe Web API supports .NET, Java, and PHP. For simplicity, the examples in this guide use PHP. However, many of the sample applications are available in all development languages.

To run the examples on a Linux installation, change any Windows-specific file paths to corresponding Linux paths.

This guide includes many code snippets. In most cases, the snippets are incomplete, lacking initialization and error-checking. For more complete versions, refer to the sample applications.

The sample applications also include links to the MapGuide documentation, but the links only work if the documentation files are visible to the web server. By default, the installation program installs the documentation in the ...\WebServerExtensions\Help folder. If you copy or move the Help folder to ...\WebServerExtensions\www\Help the documentation will be available directly from the main page of the sample applications.