If like me, the screen shot on ESRI’s Silverlight API page was a letdown, a video has surfaced that gives you some more insight into the power of this API. Silverlight really does work well, we just need more people to download the extension. I suppose it isn’t any more of a problem than the Google Earth API plugin’s problem, but I’m sure more people will have Silverlight installed that GE API with Microsoft’s push. Plus organizations can roll out the plugin overnight so there probably isn’t any reason not to go with Silverlight over Flex.

ESRI has a REST API, GeoServer is going to have one, now MapGuide might get its own RESTful service. The City of Nanaimo smartly realized that using a RESTful service was a much better way to get data to the public than a traditional WxS or ArcIMS service (take note of that NSDI 2.0 folks). Jason Birch has all the details including the URLs to explore the service. I like how Google has already crawled their service and it is discoverable via Google Search. Hopefully Jason gets some great feedback and this Nanaimo project can make it into the MapGuide trunk. Their work is impressive and the results speak for themselves.

Getting RESTful in Nanaimo, BC

The word leaked out last week from the Developer Summit agenda and now ESRI has a webpage posted with the latest info on their latest API. Yep, Silverlight. The ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight??is probably compelling for some .NET developers and we’ve seen some interesting work from IDV Solutions. What is interesting is that it allows developers to leverage Microsoft Virtual Earth in addition to the ESRI ArcGIS Online data which is much more than the Flex API can do. The current information page from ESRI is very light on details (could ESRI have chosen a less compelling example screen shot?), but given some of the immersive user interfaces I’ve seen built with Silverlight, I can only expect we’ll get our socks knocked off at the Dev Summit. So in the course of about a year, we’ve got ESRI Server APIs for .NET, Java, JavaScript, Flex and now Silverlight. So what is left, Rails?

Are you sitting down? ESRI just announced they are going to release a Silverlight API.

Like it or not, Flash is here to stay. ESRI continues to improve their APIs (and not on on the Service Pack schedule) regularly so it might be a good idea to use the feedback channels to get features you want in the next release. So check out ArcGIS API for Flex 1.1 and see what eye candy you can add to your maps.

Flex Gordon to the rescue!

As with GeoServer 1.7.1, the latest release improves some cartographic rendering capabilities of the Open Source server product. 1.7.2 brings wrapped labels and hatching to render some impressive maps. Other new additions include HTML image mapping, OGR extension to output WFS as any supported OGR output formats (I get chills thinking of the possibilities), and improvements to GeoExt Styler. If that still doesn’t get you interested, this little tidbit at the end of the post should catch your eye:

Stay tuned for the 1.7.3 release, slated for release in the next month, which will include improvements to?Geo Search, and the official release of the REST configuration API.

ESRI seems to have abandoned the event template of the past and gone with a more visually pleasing website that is actually much easier to use. I haven’t checked the videos on the front page for any references to “HTTP Goodness” but I’m sure we’ll run into it during the week.

Consider this a reminder to register and to reserve a hotel.

Google has a new tool that helps developers learn and test code for Google’s JavaScript APIs (similar to Microsoft’s VE Interactive SDK). The interactive AJAX APIs Playgound has an easy interface that allows users to interact with Google’s JavaScript APIs (Visualization, Search, Language, Blogger, Libraries, Maps, Earth, Feeds, and Calendar). Google also open sourced the API playgound so maybe we’ll be seeing more of it with other APIs in the near future (cough ESRI JavaScript API cough).