Category: Thoughts

I’ve gotten a ton of email about this subject (probably more than anything but ArcGIS Explorer) and I’ll pass along some interesting tidbits. First it would appear that many Autodesk MapGuide users are referring to the product as Autodesk MapServer, not MapServer Enterprise (apparently Autodesk puts their name in front of every product they have). Guess it didn’t take long to forget about MapServer Cheetah. Anyway, Adena has a couple of good quotes from yesterday, but this was my favorite :

“AJAX is a complex development environment.”

Autodesk staffer on why MapServer Studio is a necessity

Frank Warmerdam (via IRC) also has some good insight into why Autodesk announced MapServer Enterprise before everyone was ready:

[11/29/2005 9:20 PM] frankw: Autodesk was quite worried that if ESRI found out, they would open source ArcIMS ahead of them.

If Autodesk thinks that, then they don’t know their compeditor very well. While we’ve heard that ESRI might release parts of ArcIMS open source before, I’m sure they would never release the whole thing. There was also some misunderstanding of the reaction on Autodesk’s part:

[11/30/2005 8:40 AM] frankw: Gary (Land) did say “We expected some of this reaction & think it’s mostly FUD owning to not knowing us”.

Hmm, I’m wondering how they didn’t expect this reaction. Guess they don’t know the community any better.

Probably the most interesting email I received was from a reader who wrote this:

I’ve tried to convince many companies to use MapServer instead of ESRI products, but have always been told that MapServer is not approved by their IT staff. They only want to use ESRI for GIS and Autodesk for CAD. Now I can say Autodesk MapServer is an Autodesk application and just implement open source UMN MapServer instead. Still I need to be careful of Autodesk muscling in on my consulting business as they probably have better placed contacts with many of the companies I’m currently working for than I do. Maybe I need to take a closer look at and add ESRI products to my services.

Link – Autodesk Bars the Door to Open Design Alliance at Autodesk University – via All Points Blog

Kind of makes you wonder if they will allow people working on MapServer into their future conferences. Heck even ESRI allowed Google/Keyhole to attend the ESRI Conference (though it was low key). Just another closed door to make community members more uneasy.

Link – MapServer Community, Autodesk Announce MapServer Foundation

I wasn’t really going to comment on the formation of the MapServer Foundation until I had some time to think about it but since I’ve been getting IMs and emails about it all day I figure I’ll put some things down in a post. First if you haven’t read up on it, click on the link above to Adena’s article which is about the deepest I’ve read so far on the news.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about the goings on with MapServer, but I will say these “foundations” seem to be very popular these days to grow open source software. As for Autodesk? I’ve been a huge fan of MapGuide in the past, but the lack of development in it has pretty much killed it and if MapServer Enterprise allows them to offer product in the marketplace, then so be it. I’m hopeful that this should allow some trickle down into MapServer Cheetah (hmm, not sure about that name), but we’ll have to see how this works out in practice. The fear is that this won’t be too much of a two way street as many of the “enterprise” features will be of no use in the standard MapServer effort, but I’m sure many of the features created in Cheetah will eventually be incorporated into Enterprise. Forks are never good for software, but if managed well this should help grow MapServer. Then again part of the allure of MapServer was its community feel and if that is lost in this transition, it could affect the future growth of the product. Sean has some thoughts about this and I’m sure there are many like him out there questioning the future of MapServer.

Of course there are also many who have said MapServer can only grow if it leaves UMN behind and becomes its own entity. To have such a large and influential company such as Autodesk feel that they can base their next generation web mapping tool on an open source product says volumes to the work everyone on the MapServer project has done in the past. If Autodesk can grow the marketplace for MapServer without alienating many of those who built their businesses around implementing MapServer, it could be a win/win for all. I’m not sure of Autodesk’s experience with open source communities, but hopefully they have learned from others mistakes.

Most of the posts so far on Planet Geospatial I’ve seen on the subject are positive, but there are some lingering questions many have brought up. Hopefully in time they will be answered. Personally I can think of two instances where we proposed using MapServer, but were turned down because MapServer was OSS and wasn’t an approved vendor. I know for a fact both those times AutoCad was on site so I can only assume MapServer Enterprise would have gotten a better reception. Maybe that bodes well for all involved.

Link – MapServer Foundation – Picking up the pieces

“There was an initial flurry of “oh wow!” and “that’s interesting” messages followed by some more cautious voices and finally the unleashing of a bit of a backlash. That backlash is what Ed McNierney captured so well in his message. The initiative to form the foundation and to donate software to the foundation has the potential to go very, very wrong. Or it can be turned into something very, very good.”

For those not really familiar with what is happening with the formation of the MapServer Foundation, you should really read up on Allan’s post and some of the links he provided in it. There are some really smart people on the MapServer foundation so I can only assume in the end this will help the community, but exclusion can kill a community project. Hopefully this won’t happen here.

I’ve been playing around with ArcWeb Public Services and the different formats that can be returned (svg, swf, jpg, or png). SWF is the default image format of the map, but how does it compare to png? Take a look below at the same map returned as both swf and png.

ArcWeb Services SWF Image

ArcWeb Services PNG Image

Besides the smoothness of the swf image, the acetate point label has a nice background on it compared to the PNG image which just places the text on the map.

Link – GIS CAD Interoperability – via Rise and Shout

Well how about that…

When I just started thinking that all the ESRI bloggers were either too busy or too worried to blog anymore, a new blog by Don Kuehne appears. Might be a good topic also as GIS/CAD interoperability is a big issue for many GIS professionals. I’ll add him into Planet Geospatial if he really starts posting.

Link – StrataVarious Patent #6,307,573

“A novel display control and information management system seamlessly integrates layered and slotted formatted data from both local and remote sources to provide a highly versatile information display. The system permits selective control of display so that complex data and data flows can be seamlessly accessed with enhanced cognition of salient information by the User.”

We’ve all been doing this for years with GIS, so how can this company get a patent on this stuff? I never considered the work I’ve done in web based GIS “novel”, but maybe that is why I never thought to get a patent on it. I suspect we’ll start seeing the patent wars enter the GIS world over the next year as companies begin to discover the power of GIS. Maybe ESRI should have been getting some patents over the years to protect themselves. Is anyone else a little worried about patents being issued for prior work in GIS?

Where do I send the royalty payments to StrataVarious for my applications?

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

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.

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.