Esri Says They Have Your APIs Covered

So Silverlight, Flash and Flex are dead. Or maybe not. Honestly we’ll probably see all three around for years. Enterprises love to hold onto outdated or deprecated software (er IE6) so they’ll probably continue using these three until the development tools are dead. Given how many VB6 and VBA apps I still see out there, it will probably be years before they are gone from our browsers.

The big question of course is what will Esri do with those APIs? Well don’t fear, they are totally committed to you writing apps in libraries that have no future.

We’re committed to providing the best technology for GIS developers and giving choices from the most widely used developer platforms in the market. By offering many options, we enable developers to address different customer needs and expectations. Our commitment is not based on a specific technology, but based on supporting the GIS developer regardless of the platform chosen. Each of these areas: JavaScript/HTML 5, Flex, Silverlight, and native application code, gain significant improvements in the upcoming ArcGIS 10.1 release.

See? No worries. Plus you can use their JavaScript (notice they now append HTML5 to the end?) API to stay current”. Of course you have to use Dojo which gives you just enough bloat to call that a nice Enterprise API. Plus you can still use the ArcGIS for SharePoint to fulfill all your Enterprise API coding needs.

Seriously, if I was Esri… I’d totally get Leaflet working natively with Esri APIs out of the box and use that. Lightweight and fun. Something Esri’s heavy APIs lack.


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Thoughts

Date
November 17, 2011