MapWindow:Overview

From MapWindow GIS

MapWindow consists of the main MapWindow application, Core Components, and plug-ins.

• Main MapWindow Application (stand alone GIS application)

This is the central interface for MapWindow. From here, you may view data elements such as Shapefiles and Grids. For more details on how to interact with the main application, please see the heading "Using MapWindow".



• Core Components

These are the components which operate underneath MapWindow. The two main components are MapWinGIS and MapWinInterfaces.


• MapWinGIS (basis for MapWondow and user written GIS applications)

This is an ActiveX control which may be placed into any project in any programming language that supports ActiveX. This is the main map component - if you wanted to write a program that displayed shape data, for example, you could use this control for the display portion of your program. For detailed instructions on using this component, please see the Developer Documentation.



• MapWinInterfaces (part of MapWindow)

Also called the "Plugin Interface", this is a DLL file which will allow you to write your own plug-ins to the main MapWindow application. This may be done from any programming language which supports the creation and use of Windows Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs). For more information on developing your own custom plugins, please see the Developer Documentation.

• Plug-ins (user written extensions to MapWindow)

These are specialized tools written to interact with the main MapWindow application. Where MapWindow is mainly a data viewing tool, the real power of MapWindow comes in the form of plug-ins.
Four main plug-ins come with the main MapWindow application; these are the Table Editor, Shapefile Editor, GIS Tools, and Feature Identifier/Labeler. For more information on using these, please see the heading "Using the Plugins".