Category: Thoughts

I spent some of the morning on the IRC channel following the meeting, but I slept in and missed more than half of it. 🙂

Both Matt Perry and Gary Sherman has some good insights into what transpired. The best news is everyone (including Sean I assume also) can now move forward and try and build the open source mapping community. Keep an eye out for the “official” Mapserver Foundation/Open Source Geospatial Foundation release which will probably be up soon (as soon as they all recover 😉 ). The meeting came off with few hitches and at least the portions I observed was smooth and they went out of their way to make sure everyone had an opportunity to either speak or type (via IRC) their concerns or questions.

I agree with Matt who said it was a historic day for open source GIS and I too am really looking forward to seeing how this all falls out in the next few months.

Not sure if this was at all intentional, but ESRI has posted a short technical paper describing how to publish data with ArcGIS Server 9.2 that can be consumed by Google Earth clients.

Mapserver 4.8.0 is out and you can view the changelog or download it. Its a little late, but just in time for the Mapserver Foundation meeting.

Update – Mapserver 4.8.1 was release with some bug fixes

Brian Flood has what could possibly be the last update to Arc2Earth before it is released to the public. Brian also has posted the price of the extension ($100 US) so it is going to be very reasonable considering what you can do with it. New in the latest beta builds is improved support for graphics right out of ArcMap. I can see how you can really use this for red-line graphics or quickly highlight areas. While there are other KML export tools for ArcMap (that are mostly free), there are none that even come close to the scope of Arc2Earth. Brian’s got some more screen shots on his blog so you’ll want to click over if you are interested in really leveraging ArcMap and Google Earth together.

The KML/KMZ that Arc2Earth generates will really give ESRI something to test ArcGIS Explorer with, that is for sure.

I’ve gotten quite a bit of email asking for more information about ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) so I’ll try and answer what I can in this post. I won’t speak to specifics to the program, but mostly rehashing what has already been released by ESRI about AGX.

1. How do I become part of this beta?
Its not possible at this time. The beta is currently closed to only 9.2 beta testers. The next beta should be available publicly some time in March.

2. Does AGX require ArcGIS to run?
No, it is independent of ArcGIS. I believe that the program is somewhat based on ArcObjects and might have some ArcGIS Engine in it (there has been conflicting reports on this by ESRI), but it has been designed to be released independent of what happens in ArcGIS. I don’t believe there will ever be conflict with running an older version of ArcMap with the latest AGX release

3. Will AGX require ArcGIS Server to implement?
No. ESRI has been pushing AGX as a front end to ArcGIS Server (AGS), but you can use almost any WMS, ArcIMS, KML/KMZ or AGS. It is possible for AGX to use any web service, so you can build a task which uses other web services outside of the GIS realm, and incorporate them into an ArcGIS Explorer task.

4. Will I be able to create my own Tasks in AGX?
Yes, in fact there will be a free API to accomplish this. The default download of AGX will include everything you need to create custom tasks on the client.

5. What kind of imagery will be provided by default?
This is a harder question to answer. Every demo that ESRI has shown to the public has only had 15m resolution. I don’t know if they have any plans to increase this, but since ESRI isn’t a data provider I suspect not. You can of course use any WMS service such as the Terraserver to fill in gaps, but I don’t think there will ever be as much or as high quality imagery as Google Earth has.

6. How will AGX affect other ESRI products?
At this point we don’t know. It isn’t a replacement for ArcReader so AFAIK you can’t view ArcPublisher documents in it. I’m not sure if ArcGIS Engine will be enhanced with some capabilities as AGX, but that is also a possibility. AGX is really designed as a server client rather than a GIS reader application even though it does support adding local data sets so I suspect we’ll see more integration with AGS and ArcIMS in the future as opposed to ArcGIS Desktop. I heard ESRI say that Model Builder can be used to create tasks in AGX so maybe Desktop will help in a supporting role.

7. How do I find out more information?
The best source of information about AGX has been your local ESRI sales team. Many ESRI users have told me they have been getting tons good information about AGX that hasn’t been posted elsewhere. Google has been a good choice too. There has been much posted about AGX all over the place and if you inventory whats been said you can pretty much get the whole story. I suspect the Developer Summit will be full of AGX so if you want to learn more, you should plan to attend.

8. I want to know if AGX specifically does [this].
That I can’t tell you. If you want to know something I’ll be happy to forward you to an ESRI developer that can help, but because of the closed beta I can’t post about something that hasn’t already been leaked into the open. The Dev Summit and Business Partner Conference are just around the bend so you’ll get plenty of information then. I will say that the AGX forum on the beta site has been quite popular and the feedback seems to be helping the AGX team further develop the program. I’m sure everyone will be very excited when it is finally released to the public.

Update – ESRI emailed to let me know that they do try and clean ArcScripts out, but things slip thought. I wonder if the better solution would be to approve all ArcScripts before they get posted, that would sure stop it.

I won’t go off on my rant about commercial software in ArcScripts since I’ve done it many times in the past, but I’ve noticed something that has happened with a new commercial ArcScript and the lengths that someone will go to keep their product on the ESRI support front page. The extension is KMLr and I haven’t downloaded it because its commercial and shouldn’t be in ArcScripts. But what is interesting is practically every day it is “modified” so that it appears at the top of the latest scripts list. I can’t say for certain that there isn’t modifications to the code every day (if that is the case they really should take a break), but at least to me it seems like their are gaming the system. I had thought that ESRI said they would crack down on it, but it seems at least in this case they haven’t done a thing.

I will remind everyone that there is one commercial company that did change the way that they upload software to ArcScripts and they should be congratulated for doing so.

ArcGIS 9.2 Beta testers can log into the ESRI Beta site and download ArcGIS Explorer Beta 1. When you log in you should see a new area for ArcGIS Explorer downloads.

Note, the Public Beta will not be till at least March (I would assume the Business Partner Conference would be a good guess) as has been reported before. This is just a closed beta for ESRI ArcGIS 9.2 beta testers

The reviews are in and most seem to think that ArcWeb Explorer isn’t up to the task. Adena started off with a pretty light review, but that was about the best ArcWeb Explorer could hope for. Jithen brought up the speed and GUI issues (that most everyone noted) as well as it having trouble displaying tiles as you panned or re-sized the browser window. I have to admit, the demo I saw before had much smoother panning that this beta version does. I can only assume that this is a result of many people using it. The navigation does seem backwards to what most web mapping applications do (My preference is to use the mouse wheel for zoom and the left click for pan). I had some problems with Flash 7 on some other browsers I don’t use as much and didn’t tell me to upgrade (Yahoo Maps did this too so its not just ESRI’s problem). I also spend WAY too much time trying to figure out if there was anything exposed from the API, but I came up empty.

Anyway, the verdict is mixed, but since this is a beta we’ll be able to help ESRI figure it out. I’m more interested in the API and seeing what people can do with the Public Services and ArcWeb Explorer. ArcWeb Explorer isn’t a competitor for Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft, but a front end to ArcWeb Services. We got to keep that in mind, but if it isn’t at least an equal to their web mapping services, people will look elsewhere.

Phillip Holmstrand has been working hard on BatchGeocoder.com and has now added the ability to save the map out as a webpage to share with others and to generate a KML file of your geocoded locations to share with Google Earth. Now anyone can create their own map service with just an Excel file and use BatchGeocoder.com to host it.

Very impressive work Phillip!

I would have posted this much sooner today, but I was nowhere near an internet connection. Ever since I saw this demoed at the 2005 UC, I’ve been waiting to get my hands on it. Andrea has a nice post outlining what features are interesting with ArcWeb Explorer. You can give it a shot whenever you want to by going to the ArcWeb Explorer page on ESRI’s site. It is quite different than Yahoo!’s flash mapping tool and uses SWF and REST to make the browsing experience really smooth (hint – right click on the map). I’m very happy to see how fast it is and I am looking forward to seeing the JavaScript API as soon as ESRI gets around to exposing it soon. Adena has a short review from an users perspective and I’ll try and get some more up after the API is released.