Comments on: Best ESRI UC Day One Summary

By: How do I do that in ArcGIS/Manifold: illustrating classic GIS tasks « Free James From ESRI

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:56:36 +0000

[...] extensions that are standard with Manifold Professional. Anyone, like some of the posters over at James’ blog, looking for a real alternative to ESRI products may be convinced by this document that Manifold is [...]

By: top

top — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 06:37:58 +0000

Is there anyone else with the spatial analysis and other tools that can be implemented widely, other than ESRI.

Is that a softball? Of course, there is an alternative. See this blog of James:

http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2007/06/14/manifold-returns/

By: Canuck

Canuck — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 02:08:48 +0000

Well, after all the discussion, what can be done about it? Is there an alternative? Is there anyone else with the spatial analysis and other tools that can be implemented widely, other than ESRI. I mean, GRASS is great and can do a lot, but it certainly will not suffice for an enterprise implementation the way ESRI software does.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 04:42:46 +0000

@top: ESRI used to say ArcGIS was the largest COM based object model.

They’ve toned it down to “one of the largest COM-based commercial componentware toolkits available anywhere”.

Either way it is a beast and has become too large for most folks (which is why ArcGIS Engine is now available).

By: top

top — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 04:19:13 +0000

Somewhat tangential to the original topic:

@Cam:

Iâ€™ve been told (Iâ€™ve got no hard evidence to back this up) that ArcGIS / Arc Objects is the largest COM based application in the world. Itâ€™s supposed to be orders of magnitude bigger than what MS Office was …

Do you mean the number of lines of code? If so, this is extremely unlikely. Office is huge, tens upon tens of millions of lines. I doubt the codebase for all ESRI products combined is much larger than five million lines.

… (errâ€¦. is? Is MS Office still a COM product or has it gone to .NET??).

It has not gone .NET in that the vast majority of the code is unmanaged. This is not going to change anytime soon and quite possibly will never change at all.

By: Cellulose

Cellulose — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:57:09 +0000

LOL.

Touche James. You win this one.

By: Cam W.

Cam W. — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:55:08 +0000

I’m not at the UC this year but in response to Cellulose does anyone have a list of ‘new features’ that are coming in 9.3? I know sometimes ESRI likes to confuse new features with bug fixes but this should be pretty simple. I honestly can only think of a couple of new geoprocessing tools that are coming in 9.3. I’m not aware of any major new features.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:50:32 +0000

The promise of ArcGIS 10.x?

By: Cellulose

Cellulose — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:39:21 +0000

James–

No, I haven’t forgotten–your summary pretty much matches my notes from the same plenary… My point still stands–quality was just one of several aspects of the 9.2 release. By your own UC2005 summary, it’s clear that 9.2 was a feature release, not a quality-release. The word “quality” thrown in a couple times throughout the day doesn’t constitute a commitment to quality.

The *only* thing that makes 9.3 different is they’ve promised a whole lot less in terms of features–what will they give us to appease our anger if they fail to live up the QA promises?

By: KoS

KoS — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:56:01 +0000

Don’t forget, almost every Federal agency has it’s own culture and business practices. Some are better than others at doing the projects right. Even within a single Dept, their sub-agencies generall have different cultures and practices. Which I find somewhat weird, but understandabe once one looks under the hood.

Can’t paint using a broad brush when talking about the Feds.

I’m still amazed the system hasn’t crashed and burned by now.

KoS