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).

So the ESRI Business Partner Conference and the Developer Summit is coming up and that means that ESRI will be showing the latest releases of their software. In preparation of the DevSummit, ESRI has published new features of ArcGIS 9.3.1. I’m interested to see the faster rendering and map optimization. One thing that did catch my eye:

Upgrading to ArcGIS 9.3.1 does not require uninstalling ArcGIS 9.3.

That should speed the upgrade times up from hours to minutes. Expect 9.1.1?9.3.1 second quarter (April, May, June) 2009.

Users not wanting to use WGS84? Inconceivable!

So you’ve downloaded the JavaScript Sample Viewer from ESRI and want to use it with your own services? Well make sure those basemap services are WGS84 because they won’t show up otherwise. You aren’t losing your mind when you see nothing in the viewer, just republish them as WGS84.

It would probably be a good idea for ESRI to update their docs to reflect this.

Update: Jithen, unlike me, wasn’t happy about having to use WGS84 and he has figured out a way to get it to work.

ESRI has released a sample JavaScript viewer example with a developer’s guide to help you better understand how the JavaScript API works. It looks great (much like the Flex API) and does a darn good job having cross platform compatibility. As I said the Developer’s Guide is a great resource for those looking for an introduction to the JavaScript API, Dojo, Aptana Sudio, and what it takes to develop ArcGIS Server JavaScript applications.