Link – James help me snap out of the blogging coma
“When it comes to the ArcScripts site and removing demo products or other commercial goods – I couldn’t agree more; but I think that doing so is really only a Band-Aid at best. What we really need to do is ask ourselves; what do we really want in a collaborative code sharing environment? I’m sure that most of us have already used SourceForge, GotDotNet or perhaps the new O’Reilly CodeZoo. All of these have great facilities for establishing code sharing workspaces, providing infrastructure relating to enhancements, bugs and also rating and collaborative discussion.”
Boy this is really nice to hear. Most of us have problems with the current layout of the ESRI support website and having them move off of a proprietary CMS to something like SourceForge or GotDotNet would be wonderful. There are many “scripts” loaded into the ArcScripts repository that have source code attached to them but almost no way to collaborate on development of them. A move to something like this and away from the traditional layout would do wonders to foster grassroots development of ArcGIS add ons (both for Desktop and Server). Personally I kind of like the GotDotNet option, but one of my programmers prefers CodeZoo (which I will say is growing on me). To just think that something like Walt’s PHP ArcWeb code could have a place where we could collaborate on it or Andrea’s demos could spark interest in Public ArcWeb. Even projects like TerraServer Image Download could be enhanced with this kind of collaboration.
Everyone should let Brian know what you think about this and what features you’d want to see.