Category: Thoughts

The news out of Yahoo! this morning is that they have released their User Interface Library which inluces a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript under a BSD license and their Design Pattern Library under a Creative Commons license. On top of that, they also have started up the Yahoo! User Interface Blog to evangelize both releases. A cursory look shows that some of these tools are right out of the new Yahoo! Email beta and Yahoo! Maps beta (as well as some of the My Yahoo! interface).

I’ve been playing with the latest beta of Arc2Earth exporting 3D shapefiles to Google Earth. I’ve used ArcScene to display these in the past, but not everyone has 3D Analyst to view it. The depth of features of Arc2Earth is amazing and the ability to customize each layer you wish to export is almost endless. I’ve only scratched the surface of what this extension can do and the latest beta of A2E is really making me want to try some more.

Tobin Bradley has posted about the speed difference between ArcIMS and Mapserver. “Although I can’t rerun their test to validate the results, I can anecdotally support them – I have certainly found MapServer to perform significantly faster than ArcIMS, and that experience has been echoed to me by other parties. The study found MapServer to be about 30% faster than ArcIMS, which sounds about right.” Wow, 30% faster! That gets your attention, but when looking at the posted results in his post (he says he found them on a listserv, but Google wasn’t kind to me today) you see on average that UMN MapServer is half a second quicker than ArcIMS in the performed test. Not exactly anything to be amazed about and probably not measurable by most people and certainly not significant.

I won’t argue with anyone who says UMN MapServer is fast because I’ve seen it, but in our real world applications we haven’t noticed any difference between our applications running on ArcIMS vs those running on MapServer. Benchmarking something like that is a complete waste of our time, plus I don’t own a stopwatch. The bigger issue with the speed of both GIS server applications is how and where your data is installed. It is easy to get caught up on these speed claims with server software and they are fun for posting to Digg, but in the real world there are way too many variables to worry about 1/2 a second waiting for a map to be served.

ArcIMS does has some issues, but I don’t consider speed to be one of them.

Update – looks like ESRI posted the incorrect document. The link has been updated.

ESRI has posted the SOAP Object Model for AWS 2006 on their support site. It is on the last page of the brochure.

Mike’s looking at some open source GIS solutions to move from ArcGIS. He’s been trying to do everything for “free” using Fedora Linux and he’s been blogging about it. Some really interesting thoughts come to mind about how to get support from an open source community vs. a corporate support model such as ESRI. If you want to help him out I’m sure he’d be happy to get some comments about what to do next while he compiles QGIS, GRASS and GDAL.

Cory might be on to something. Everybody it seems is now blogging about GIS (I’ve added over new brand new feeds to Planet Geospatial and activated 10 others that have started back up) and there are a ton of people moving from “classic VB” or C++ to .NET using ArcObjects. If you’ve started to do the same or are thinking about it, you might want to take a look at his post.

Jeremy Bartley just posted an interesting “hack” to make ArcIMS image services easier to use in Google Earth. The problem has been that by default you were only getting coverage of the GE window, meaning that once you panned even a little bit, you had to wait for a whole new image. Jeremy figured out that if you request 4 images you get coverage beyond the display window allowing you to pan and still see the image. Of course it still isn’t perfect, but in his quad implementation, I actually didn’t mind an ArcIMS image service in Google Earth for practically the first time.

Go over to his blog and check out the two network links, one with the quad tiling and the normal one image link. I’m impressed!

I’ve gotten word of another ESRI ArcWeb Explorer example currently out in the wild. The IP address that hosts the SWF is registered to ESRI. Nature Valley has a section on their website called “Where’s Yours?” which asks people to put pins on a make of their favorite places on a map. You wouldn’t think it was an ESRI map at first glance, but underneath it all is ArcWeb Explorer.

So where is that API guys? 🙂

I see Andrea has updated his example of using ArcWeb Services with Perl to take advantage of the new ArcWeb 2006. You can see the results here. Pretty simple, but as I tried to get it working on my hosted account, I have to say I’m just so sick of Perl and SOAP (SOAP is way too much for simple maps on a webpage). I’m going to hold off on any ArcWeb stuff until the API is out for ArcWeb Explorer.

Zillow.com blows me away. It has been so hard to get home prices around the country on the internet. You usually have to enter some information and run the fear that a real estate agent might give you a call even though all you want to see is how much your house is valued. I’m not sure how accurate the values are, but looking at my neighborhood its pretty much right on. The service itself is really easy to use. The front page is almost like Google, just fill out a simple form and away you go. The map viewer is AJAX based so you barely have to wait for the housing values to come up.

Zillow gives consumers power they haven’t had in the real estate market before. Now if someone can only figure out how to reduce real estate agent commissions we’ll all be set. 😉

Update – Looks like the New York Times caught on to the story. Everyone will be using Zillow this week.