Author: James

When I visited ESRI a couple weeks ago I was told there wouldn’t be as much REST documentation as SOAP and that made sense to me at the time as using SOAP was pretty much the only way to take advantage of ArcWeb in the past. Still after playing with REST and ArcWeb this weekend, I’m a little disappointed at the documentation. Hopefully this will improve as ArcWeb 2006 gets rolled out more, but if I was starting out with ArcWeb 2006 I’m sure I would be confused to how it all works. Of course one could visit the ArcWeb REST forums on ESRI’s support site, but I doubt many programmers would bother as Google Search is how most of us get our information.

That said, I’m really impressed with the changes in ArcWeb 2006 over the older v2 version. The map quality around the world is much better than Google’s (at least where I tried).

Update – I got an email from a reader who wants to know what I’d expect from ESRI as far as REST documentation. Well I don’t think one has to go as far as Google did with theirs, but I’d like that after you sign up for ArcWeb Public Services you’d get code that could make a simple map with map controls to zoom/pan much like Google does. That would give anyone the opportunity to make a map and post it on a webpage. The simple example from Google is here, just a cut and paste “Hello World” application which creates this map. ESRI’s default example isn’t that easy due to how one has to request the token.

I’ve been playing around with Public ArcWeb Services and it seems that I know very little of how Flash works because I didn’t have a clue that a SWF file would resize to the browser window no matter what I told AWS to return the image size (a 250×200 pixel swf).

Actually, my respect for SWF as a web mapping format grows each time I use it. After using SOAP with AWS in version 2, I love the simplicity of REST.

Now that Arizona State University has won the Territorial Cup back from those folks from down in Tucson. 🙂

Link – KML Home Companion 3.0.4

KML Home Companion is out of beta and has some bug fixes. Eveyone will probably want to download the latest version. KML Home Companion has really come together as a great tool to get your GIS datasets out of ArcGIS and into Google Earth.

Fixes in 3.0.4

Fixed points with categories – first point was being dropped
Tessellate works correctly – tag was misspelled

Fixes in 3.0.3

Fixed polygon fill with categories – first polygon was being dropped

Fixes in 3.0.2

Polygons can have “holes” – innerBoundaryIs tag now implemented
Fixed polygon extrusion

New Features in 3.0

Can create single or multiple placemarks for a layer
Allows either a default color or the ArcMap layer symbology
Error checking for geometry types
Transparency is displayed as a percentage instead of a Hex number
Refresh button for layer listing
Easier method of selecting output directory

Link – A little KML to CSV converter

I wrote a quick and dirty XSLT-hack to convert a KML-file to a very basic CSV-structure, which I could later import as X/Y coordinates to ArcGIS.

OK, its not really a KML to ArcGIS converter, but it will allow any ArcGIS Desktop user to import KML point files into ArcMap as a CSV file. It really hasn’t been developed yet, but there are plans to enhance the converter to support GML and lines and polygons. There has been a huge focus on ArcGIS to KML, but not much on the reverse.

The part after you stuff yourself full of turkey and stuffing and then plop yourself on the couch to watch some football. Of course there still is some pumpkin pie to come, but we’ll cross that bridge when it happens.

Enjoy the holiday folks, and to those not in the USA, I’ll eat plenty of pie for all of us.

Link – Back to non-GYM, happy Thanksgiving

Scoble links to Spatially Adjusted in a non-GYM post, maybe Public ArcWeb Services 2006 is timed just right to take advantage of this Google Mapping rut people seem to be in. Heck, I bet Scoble doesn’t even know about ArcGIS Explorer, all the fun of Google Earth, but none of the “GYM” baggage.

Link – “Proprietary” Formats: KML and GML

It would appear that the only salient difference in proprietary-ness is that KML was developed by a single company (albeit with input from others), whereas GML was developed by a standards committee. The salient difference in the marketplace is that KML is usable and hand-editable, whereas GML is rather too complex for use without tools. In contrast to what one might expect, the standards committee developed format requires tools to create, whereas the one developed by Keyhole does not.

Strong words against the GML camp, but some of it might be deserved. Personally I’ve not run into too many people complaining about KML being proprietary, but I’ve seen people bring it up on different blogs. As a GIS professional I don’t really care about which formats have OGC standard labels on them as most of our clients use one of 3 formats for data interchange; e00, shapefile or personal geodatabase, all ESRI formats. I don’t see the day anytime soon where KML will get added to that list, but if ESRI continues to integrate KML support into their products and continues to ignore GML it could happen.

I got hammered a months ago about complaining that much of these open formats aren’t supported in ArcCatalog and saying it was up to the open source community integrate into ArcGIS products, rather than ESRI. I think at this point with ESRI OGC support usually limited to an ArcGIS extension, someone needs to step up and write some tools for GIS professionals to integrate OGC support into their ESRI workflows because ESRI doesn’t seem to think it is a priority. There are tons of open source tools that support both OGC and proprietary ESRI standards and formats, but you have to pay money on top of ArcGIS to get such support in ArcGIS. Many look at this as ESRI’s fault and maybe it is, but given all the KML export/import tools being developed for ArcGIS, you’d think someone would take on the challenge and integrate all the GDAL tools into a nice toolbar or toolbox.

I’ve added a couple new feeds to Planet Geospatial and in doing so I think I hit the limit of what the python script and my server could handle as the script started to time out. A quick look at the feed list showed many sites that aren’t updated anymore or aren’t really blogs. I’m personally going to keep all the feeds in my RSS aggregator, so if any start posting again I’ll add them right back in.

The end result is that the script runs very quick and I’m happy with how the site has turned out. I’ve been maintaining a change log (you’ll see the link right below the generated date) of all revisions so you can follow what has been added or subtracted (and why).

I know ArcWeb is working, but when I try and use the account I set up for Public ArcWeb Services I get the following error. Probably user error, but still very frustrating 🙁

Update – Andrea Rosso in the comments says as I suspected, user error.