Thanks for the great discussion as always.

I have just recently pondered the same things about web GIS. We have progressed over time towards a Mapserver based WMS with an Openlayers frontend. Why Openlayers..well it mimicks Google the best and that is what the end user knows…so there is no need to “train” them on using navigation tools etc. The other reason of course is price. And yes..end users do not care about what the backend is…as long as it looks good, is easy to use and does what they want.

You can see my train of thought at my company blog. I will probably get a flaming for my thinking…..but I welcome a constructive argument!

Cheers Andrew

Yadda yadda yadda. We all know that the landscape of our industry is changing, and the old guard should be on notice, but show me the solution that seamlessly bridges that gap between the legacy GIS resources and the contemporary commercial services. There are some products that have promise but they are not the panacea they are made out to be. I’m as excited about all this as the next guy but with all the options the variables involved in integrating the growing number of innovations are staggering. I fear the kludge will soon be king. Whoever provides a stable product and or service to paying customers who can plug and play their way to consolidating these disparate resources will be the true winner. The GIS middleware market is fertile ground.

Thanks for thinking about this stuff. I really helps those of us who don’t have the time to brainstorm about where GIS might be in 2-5 years.

Keep up the great work!

It sounds like you see the difference between GIS and non-GIS.

Not really. What I’m saying here is if traditional GIS implementors want to reach out to clients they never would have looked at 5 years ago, they need to look at hosted services. Just because the local dog washing service doesn’t work with desktop/server GIS doesn’t mean that they can’t take advantage of GIS’ benefits.

Maybe the terminology was sloppy on my part, but the message is services will allow you to help them out.

Yah, we are not even on the AGS side yet, but pushing out a couple hundered layers of data to ArcIMS for viewing.

Moving to other platforms makes sense once we have a fluid method to go from Arc on the desktop to the internet and have the same level of control and access. I know many locales are already making this kind of move but in a long established shop where you have other infrastracture apps based on the ESRI platform you tend to be forced to maintain it.

GeoPrise is actually going very much the MapDotNet route, where our UI supports consuming data from a variety of sources, so we just provide you a unified publishing method with a consistent user experience with all of the buzzwords supporting it (AJAX/WCF/WPF etc) but we have a way to go.

True, but you can build all that lovely analytic functionality on top of an openlayers/VE/tile cache powered site. You’ll get a boat load more performance, have a lot more options in terms of UI (prototype & MS Ajax & name-your-ajax-library-de-jour) and save a ton on your licensing (assuming you’re using AGS for the analytics).

I be clear – these other options are not for Joe GIS at the county who needs to stage up a “map”. AGS is great for that – easy and who cares about performance b/c there aren’t many users. These options come into play where you have 100′s to 1000′s or more users of a focused application.

Dave

Dave