MapGuide Viewer for Non MSIE or Windows Machines

[pmead]

Has ANYONE gotten the MapGuide viewer installer to work on any browser/os other than ActiveX on Windows machines? If so how? This is one of the most falsly advertised installer and poorly written documentation I've ever seen. Frankly, we cannot get it to work and if anyone else has, please let me know how so we can get our users to see the maps we've spent so much time creating in MapGuide.

[Glenn Pope]

The users have to have an activeX compatible browser. There is just no way around that. Thou IE has a 97% market share, so most people will have no problem viewing your maps. Also if they do use another browser, they still have IE on there systems and can just switch to it. Like I do :) The only people left out are Linux users.

[pmead]

When a Mac user (even one with IE) clicks on the installer, it completes the so-called instalation, but does not work. They complete the dowload, go to the page with the map, but cannot see anything and get an error message indicating that it is missing the application-x-mwf. Why doesn't the installer work? If you have installed on a Mac what did you do to make it work? DId you have to adjust the mime-types, move a file, what?

[Glenn Pope]

I guess there is a way around using IE. According to Autodesk. Have you see this page?
Autodesk MapGuide Viewer Download and Installation FAQ (http://www.mapguide.com/Downloads/downloadfaq.cfm)

[Glenn Pope]

A few more links
Using Autodesk MapGuide with Macintosh and UNIX (http://www.dot.pima.gov/gis/mapguide/mgjava.cfm)

MapGuide Viewer Compatibility Issues (http://www.dot.pima.gov/gis/mapguide/compatibility.htm)

MG viewer for Mac issue (http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?threadID=335044)

[pmead]

These are for the older versions, not the MapGuide 6.5 Authored pages which require the new Viewer to see. I've seen this site and it does not help -- we can't even get the error messages they refer to as we cannot get the installation to function.

[Glenn Pope]

Well I did some more searching and just couldn't find anything else. Have you talked to your reseller or tried Autodesk's technical support? The only other thing I can think of, and this really a shot in the dark, is to uninstall and clear out the browser cache. I'm not familiar with macs, so don't know if it even dose this.

Sorry:(

[pmead]

This has now become a ticket for Autodesk. Here are the details in case someone else logs in who might have run into the same problem. Once these questions are answered I anticipate posting here what was done.

SUMMARY: We are unable to get the Java Installers (via Autodesk's site or via the 6.5 install CD) for MapGuide Viewer 6.5 to install and configure Internet Explorer 5.2.3 to work under Mac OS X 10.3.5. (The current Java versions under Mac OS X are: 1.3.1 & 1.4.2.)

QUESTIONS for Autodesk:

(1.) Should any other files have been installed other than the "mgjava.jar" discussed above? (We see two files which were apparently not installed from the CD: MapGuideCD/Java/Distribution/install/DetectPluginApplet.class and MapGuideCD/Java/Distribution/install/ie_mac_mrj/vi_mac.jar.)

(2.) AutoDesk documentation specifies that the System Requirements include "Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x with Java VM MRJ 2.2.4". The latter is an older Mac OS 9 Java component and is not used under Mac OS X. In your own testing, which version(s) of Mac OS X have you tested successfully with the Java installer? Which version(s) of Java were installed on your test machine(s)?

(3.) It appears that some additional, manual configuration(s) may be required that are not handled by the Autodesk installer. We've requested AutoDesk to provide the configuration details with which they successfully configured the MapGuide Viewer under Mac OS X? Did AutoDesk use a different Explorer "File Helper" configuration than what we tried above? (We could find no documentation specifying this, but it appears that the simple presence of the "mgjava.jar" file is not enough to view MapGuide content.)

Again, in case anyone has run into and fixed this problem I'd appreciate a response. Othewise I will wait for AutoDesk and will post the solution.

Thanks.