ArcGIS Server services in Virtual Earth

January 16, 2008 4 Comments

Dave Bouwman just wrote up his findings on bringing ArcGIS Server web service (using the WMS service and SOAP API) into Virtual Earth. Another great example of using a hosted web service with your existing GIS projects.

I’m pretty sure the ESRI Developer Summit will be full of folks wanting to know about using Virtual Earth in their ESRI web applications and doing it outside of the Web ADF. The REST API cannot come soon enough IMO for those who develop using the ESRI platform.

Filed under ArcGIS Server, ESRI, Microsoft, Virtual Earth

About James Fee
Chief Evangelist for WeoGeo.com

4 Responses to ArcGIS Server services in Virtual Earth

  1. Tim Maddle says:
    January 16, 2008 at 6:04 pm

    This is exactly what I’ve been doing with MapServer and it works splendidly on a fairly modest server (compared to Dave’s AGS Server) when backed up by indexed shapefiles. Since I know Dave checks in on this blog, I’ll ask here about the complexity of the layer and the rendering speeds (exclusive of the adaptive caching) here.

  2. Dave Bouwman says:
    January 17, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    @Tim

    Right now the service is super simple – just counties, municipalities and some state highways. I was just using a service that we already had setup.

    As far as rendering speed – pulling from the cache is only marginally faster than direct rendering by the server – again this box has 8 cores, 8 GB RAM, running 10 SOCs for this service and has no other load while I was testing it (amazing what you can get from Dell for $2500!)

    In the next while I’m going to create a better map (more complex data, pretty rendering etc), and put up a demo site where people can play with it. Watch my blog for more details…

    Cheers,

    Dave

  3. Tim Maddle says:
    January 17, 2008 at 5:39 pm

    You got that for $2,500?!?!? Sweet. Of course, wouldn’t that many cores cost you your first-born child in a production environment for AGS?

    I use simple REST based ASP.NET handlers to overlay tiles on VE and handle identification by clicking. Now I’m adding some simple classes to do select by polygon and select by buffer using MapServer and present the results using a gridview attached to an object datasource. For a programmer, VE is a really fun tool.

  4. Tim Maddle says:
    January 19, 2008 at 7:51 am

    A nice tool for working with VE Tiles is the Firefox addin FireBug. If you click on the “Net” tab, you can see each tile request and how long it takes to complete.