Category: Thoughts

All Howard Butler wanted to do is write a GDAL driver for ArcSDE raster support. He couldn’t afford a production license of ArcSDE, but he took a look at ESRI’s EDN which is supposed to help people like him develop using ESRI Server tools. After looking at the fine print, he’s wondering if he can use it at all.

The problem is that I’m an independent developer, and I don’t have the financial resources to purchase a full ArcSDE seat (or have the ability to include it in the development of the driver, which would inflate the cost of development by nearly four times). Initially, I thought EDN had the potential to support development like this, but after reading the license, I’m not so sure.

My companies lawyers read the agreement and didn’t think any of it would constrict us, but everyone is different. Anyone from ESRI EDN (I’d ask Brian but he’s not at ESRI anymore) care to help Howard out?

What happens to the imagery when Google (or Microsoft for that matter) updates their image database? Does Google allow people to access this data or does it disappear off into the digital wastebasket?

In the past month I’ve had 4 people tell me that they are probably not going to be using ESRI Server (ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, ArcSDE) on their projects unless their clients specifically demand it. I’m not talking about 4 people off the street here, but ESRI MVP types. When asked why they felt this way, they all said it was because they have invested so much in their web clients that they no longer needed to be tied to ESRI Server products and their added cost. One also said that there was nothing in the new ArcGIS Server 9.2 that they would be using anyway so it made no more sense to pay maintenance. Interesting that this is happening now, after ESRI is finally delivering clients that developers can use (ArcGIS Explorer, Web ADF). When I mentioned the Web ADF to one of these folks, she just laughed and said they already put thousands of dollars into their own web client and they didn’t want to walk away from it. I guess if the Web ADF had come out at lets say 9.1, many people might be already locked into the ESRI server stack. But the delay has caused people to go out on their own and in turn they have looked at open source solutions.

The other issue is that the added functionality of ArcGIS Server doesn’t give them any value. Some of the functions of AGS are impressive, but in the real world they have almost no applicability. As one person said to me, “ArcIMS really hasn’t changed in the past 3 years, so why should I pay maintenance on such a product? I’m sure the new wizard based map creation back end will be helpful to some, but it doesn’t add anything to my development work flows.” Another said that AGS is impressive, but speed makes it very difficult to use. “We looked at a combination of ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS to try and get a handle on speed issues, but the cost was so great that we just abandoned that route and went with Mapserver. We had some cool stuff going on but in the end we couldn’t justify the cost.”

So implementors of server GIS products are beginning to look elsewhere because of perceived value and speed right at the time ESRI is releasing their most impressive server update in years. As one business partner told me, “Desktop is so impressive that I can’t ever see using something else, but in the server marketplace, the competition might have surpassed ESRI.” Simplicity, speed and freedom seem to be at the forefront of web GIS and ESRI might be losing out on that front. We’ll have to see what ArcGIS 9.2 does to that, but it would appear that release might be 1 year too late.

Remember when I was complaining about cloud coverage over my house? Well the latest update to the Google imagery removes the clouds, but reverts back to an older image. The freeway on this new image is no longer finished. I guess someone thinks that a less relevant image is better than having to deal with clouds. I’m not so sure about that. I want that old image with the clouds and the updated road network back.

New image without clouds

Old image with clouds

Brian Timoney brings up a great question in the comments to my last post.

James: I’d love a show of hands of folks that never made the switch to 8.x or 9.x because of common everyday tasks that a 3.x workflow still carries out quiet satisfactorily…

I use ArcView 3.2a almost every day myself, though I’ll be honest I can’t recall the last time I wrote an Avenue script. I guess I have them all ready to go, already written. Just copy and paste into a new APR and away I go.

I talked about trying to get some of our clients to move to ArcGIS over a year ago.

From an email this morning:

james, love the blog! I have a question that I hope you can answer. I was looking at some of the downloads on ESRI’s ArcScripts site and noticed that they are all listed as having a license of “public domain”. Downloading ET GeoWizards LT, I don’t see any of the source code included. How can ESRI allow this program to exist on the ArcScripts site if it doesn’t include the source?

We’ll we’ve been down this road once or twice. ESRI has eliminated much of the commercial software so it has gotten better. Still I do find it humorous that ET GeoWizards LT does have a Public Domain license, though I’m 100% sure that isn’t the intention of the developer. ArcScripts really isn’t public domain even though ESRI claims it is. Think of it as more “non-commercial”. There are a ton of public domain/open source scripts and applications out there, but just because ArcScripts shows it to be public domain, doesn’t mean it is.

Well we did it again!

Thursday marked the 100th day of 100-degree temperatures, and there are likely more on the horizon.

Friday’s forecast calls for sunny skies and a high of 102, with Saturday’s the same except for a high of 101.

The National Weather Service reported that the 100th day of 100 degree days puts Phoenix ahead of the average of about 90 days a year through 1995, the most recent figures available. The fewest 100-degree days was 48 in 1914 and the most was 143 in 1989.

I’ve been checking out the update to Virtual Earth Bird’s Eye View and was taking a look at Camelback Mountain. One interesting feature that I’ve always loved is Praying Monk. In Google Earth you don’t get the resolution you’d like, but maybe there are ways around that.

But in Virtual Earth Bird’s Eye, you get a totally different perspective.

There is just so much to explore using Bird’s Eye. I’ll admit, I wasn’t too excited about the 45 degree view when it was announced, but boy do I love it now. Oh and I live nowhere close to the Praying Monk (not in my price range), but you can stay right next to it anytime you want (again, REALLY not my price range).

Yes as of today, the ArcGIS 9.2 beta is closed. All the beta forums are now read only (actually not all, but most) and beta users are supposed to use normal ESRI support methods. ESRI has created a new website, ArcGIS 9.2 Prerelease (login with your existing ESRI account), where you can still download software updates and get information about the prerelease and release candidates. And the best news? ArcGIS 9.2 will begin shipping November 2006 to customers (though I’ve gotten reports that ESRI sales reps are saying December 2006).

Keep an eye out for that 9.2 Beta survey and fill it out. Tell ESRI you’d like to see MORE blogs and MORE wiki’s in the future and that they were helpful. Personally I liked the beta site so much more than the previous beta sites ESRI has done. I hope this new portal is the future as both the beta site and the new ESRI Customer Care portal are such a big improvement over the older sites.

Slashgeo has written up on a user “Redlands” contributing to articles on ESRI and GIS in general. The ethical issues aside, you just can’t tell if this really is someone from ESRI or not because there is no IP to verify. Even then, just because it says that the IP came from the inland empire, that still doesn’t mean it was someone from ESRI. Bottom line is that we have no idea who this person is and it just reinforces my stance that you can’t trust Wikipedia.