Category: Thoughts

I’ve been checking up on the agenda for the ESRI User Conference 2006 (online, can’t find a PDF to print out) and I’ve been trying to figure out what I should go to. Since I went to all those “What’s new in ArcGIS 9.2” last year I won’t bother with them this year, so I’m going to focus on probably ArcIMS (our bread and butter) as well as some ArcWeb stuff. I was surprised to see that there isn’t any session called “Creating Mashups with ArcWeb Explorer”. You’d think ESRI would want to capitalize on this mashup phenomena with a session tied to creating quick mashups using Public ArcWeb Services. The sessions for ArcWeb have scary names such as “ArcWeb Services: Managing Medical Surge Capacity ‘ Integrating Web Services to Support Real-Time Decision Making for Patient Transport During Casualty Incidents”. The Dev Summit is where you can get nutty with development stuff, but the ESRI UC isn’t aimed at developers. Its not too late to add a “Mashup Camp” island to the floor where you can suck people up and teach them how they create mashups.

Is there anything else you think ESRI is missing on their agenda?

I was taking a look at the list of sponsors and exhibitors at the UC and it appears that Oracle once again won’t be at the UC. Our clients are totally committed to Oracle and it isn’t like we aren’t doing well with it, but it kinda makes you wonder about the state of relations between ESRI and Oracle.

People seem to have really hit on this GIS for the masses and wondering why there is no real ESRI solution below ArcView. We all know there isn’t, but ESRI has given developers the tools to create one. Frankly I’m am amazed that no one has taken ArcGIS Engine and created their own “ArcView Lite”. Using the runtime you can pretty much do what probably 90% of people usually do with an ArcView license (you know, the masses).

Heck .NET or Java (I say Java, but I don’t know much about how good Java support is for Engine) take your pick.

The date says it has been out a couple days, but I guess I missed all those annoucements (would be a great item to have an rss feed for) but it looks like ESRI has released ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 2 (includes ArcGIS Server SP2), ArcIMS 9.1 Service Pack 2 and ArcSDE 9.1 Service Pack 2. The list of fixes is also available on those pages so take a look and see if your favorite issue (cough bug) was fixed.

Being nostalgic seems to be in vogue this week so I’ll continue with subject. Back in the old days of ArcInfo (you know like way back in the early 90s 😉 ) ESRI used to have a wonder set of printed manuals. These were in nice binders if I recall and were such a great reference (binders lay flat so you don’t have to fight them like the latest ArcGIS documentation). Well in time they have been replaced by PDF and online help, but I can’t help but begin to wonder if the days of even PDF documentation are over. We use the ArcXML reference so much, we paid to have it printed and bound.

I’d love to do the same with ArcDesktop help, but I’ve never found a PDF of the whole help to print. I’m guessing there isn’t one and the web help is supposed to be the primary method of getting documentation. I’m left wondering if we’ll be able to print out the AXL reference at 9.2 (I’m guessing not) which is too bad. I’d have no problem paying for printed documentation from ESRI for ArcGIS Desktop and extensions as well as their server products. I don’t expect ESRI to all of a sudden start making documentation, but there has to be a way they can hook up with a printing service where we could order such documentation. Maybe I’m the only one here who thinks like this anymore, but web-based or HTML help isn’t my cup of tea.

ESRI Salesman circa 1957

Atanas Entchev is but I don’t understand why. I too remember ArcView 1 and at least what I remember wasn’t very positive. That said, he’s got a good point, but doesn’t come to the same conclusion that I would have (I’m skipping ArcCAD because I don’t want to even touch that can of worms).

Atanas says that there is no base of the GIS pyramid. Now before you say the same things I would say, we have to realize that Atanas’ GIS pyramid is really an ESRI pyramid. He’s right, you have the ArcInfo guys at the top, the ArcView guys in the middle and at the bottom you have what? ArcReader and ArcExplorer might be that bottom but I’d wager there are more people using ArcInfo in the world than use ArcReader. So maybe that is the whole point of ArcGIS Explorer, making GIS available to anyone who wants it with compatibility with ESRI “standards”.

But wait a minute, didn’t I say I would have come to a different conclusion than Atanas did? Right off the top of my head I can name QGIS and uDig as great free GIS programs that people can use instead of spending thousands on ArcView. Of course it isn’t fair to either program as they are both much more powerful than ArcView 1 was or ArcGIS Explorer will be. Of course Atanas’ article points out the biggest problem that open source GIS has in the traditional GIS community (the one that doesn’t read blogs Dave). Visibility! Says Atanas:

The GIS pyramid base is real, and it’s huge. It needs a simple solution.

The solution is there, but the eyeballs are focused on ESRI. Heck I’m not even bringing up Google Earth as the base of the pyramid and who knows what the future holds for it.

Once a year, thousands of GIS professionals get together in one of the greatest cities in the world, for a love fest and open source GIS isn’t invited. Might be time to get some money together, and throw a party guys. Invite all those ESRI fanboys, show them some cool software (throw in some beer and I’ll be there) and open some eyes. Until then, professional GIS will be dominated by those who exist in an ESRI centric world.

Yep, without ArcIMS 9.2 beta 2, I just can’t seem install it just yet. So it sits and awaits its brother to arrive sometime this month I guess.

I’ve gotten a couple people asking me why I haven’t said much about the blog conversation topic that Dave, Adena, Allan and Frank have touched on. I’ve been traveling the last couple days and haven’t even been able to check me email, let alone read Planet GS.

I think everyone has pretty much hit on the major points of the discussion. I know there are many more people here that lurk than post on my blog and there isn’t anything wrong with that. When people feel they have something to add to the conversation, I’m sure they’ll do it. I do get comments that people seem to feel more comfortable emailing me than posting on my blog. So there are usually side conversations that happen that people never hear about. We’ll see how this progresses over the next year, but given where the GIS blog community was at this time in 2005, I think we’ll see great progress by 2007.

Over the weekend I saw that ESRI posted two code samples of SVG ArcWeb services for vb.NET and C# in “ESRI Labs” (or ArcScripts for some of us). I’m going to be traveling for the rest of the week so I won’t be getting into this code for some time (I had ignored the first samples because they were Java). If you don’t have an Public ArcWeb login, you can get one here and then download the code from ArcScripts (see links above). All you have to do is make a simple change to the web.config and you are in business. You’ll also want to download the SVG plugin. Even though Firefox does handle SVG “out of the box” it is slow and can’t do all the functionality that the plugin can.

I really want to explore SVG some more and now that there are .NET samples, I’ve run out of excuses. (click for large image)