Category: Thoughts

ESRI has posted a preview video of ArcGIS Explorer build 900. I’m looking forward to seeing it in person at the Dev Summit.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I4E0Yv0jPg&w=560&h=315]

From time to time, someone will stand up and proclaim themselves above “stacks”. I’ve done it and I’m sure you also do it. The reality is that we apply our preferences on our own GIS Stacks. Should you fear a stack As I often like to say, the best solution for the best problem. This might mean an ESRI stack one morning, a GeoServer stack in the afternoon and maybe a Microsoft stack at night. The term stack seems to be getting a bad rap in the geo world. I suppose being close minded about solutions (even within proprietary and open source stacks) can cause you to implement the wrong solution at the wrong price. I like the idea of the problem dictating what solution stack you’ll go with in the end. I’ve got preferences to my solutions, but I rarely enter a project exactly knowing what the whole stack will look like (beyond the OS). As I begin to prepare to kickoff a project next week with a client, I’m thinking tonight about what I’m working with; ArcSDE 9.2, Apache with Tomcat and Oracle 10g. Beyond that I’m free to work with whatever solution best meets the customers needs. Do we go with ArcGIS Server 9.2 or 9.3 Do we go with the Java Web ADF or the ESRI REST API Do we go with GeoServer or MapServer Do we go with the ArcGIS JavaScript API or OpenLayers?

I can’t wait until next week to find out our stack.

Will it be the stack behind door number 1, door number 2 or door number 3

If like me, the screen shot on ESRI’s Silverlight API page was a letdown, a video has surfaced that gives you some more insight into the power of this API. Silverlight really does work well, we just need more people to download the extension. I suppose it isn’t any more of a problem than the Google Earth API plugin’s problem, but I’m sure more people will have Silverlight installed that GE API with Microsoft’s push. Plus organizations can roll out the plugin overnight so there probably isn’t any reason not to go with Silverlight over Flex.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-zsWoscmIM&w=560&h=315]

ESRI has a REST API, GeoServer is going to have one, now MapGuide might get its own RESTful service. The City of Nanaimo smartly realized that using a RESTful service was a much better way to get data to the public than a traditional WxS or ArcIMS service (take note of that NSDI 2.0 folks). Jason Birch has all the details including the URLs to explore the service. I like how Google has already crawled their service and it is discoverable via Google Search. Hopefully Jason gets some great feedback and this Nanaimo project can make it into the MapGuide trunk. Their work is impressive and the results speak for themselves.

Getting RESTful in Nanaimo, BC

The word leaked out last week from the Developer Summit agenda and now ESRI has a webpage posted with the latest info on their latest API. Yep, Silverlight. The ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight??is probably compelling for some .NET developers and we’ve seen some interesting work from IDV Solutions. What is interesting is that it allows developers to leverage Microsoft Virtual Earth in addition to the ESRI ArcGIS Online data which is much more than the Flex API can do. The current information page from ESRI is very light on details (could ESRI have chosen a less compelling example screen shot?), but given some of the immersive user interfaces I’ve seen built with Silverlight, I can only expect we’ll get our socks knocked off at the Dev Summit. So in the course of about a year, we’ve got ESRI Server APIs for .NET, Java, JavaScript, Flex and now Silverlight. So what is left, Rails?

Are you sitting down? ESRI just announced they are going to release a Silverlight API.

As with GeoServer 1.7.1, the latest release improves some cartographic rendering capabilities of the Open Source server product. 1.7.2 brings wrapped labels and hatching to render some impressive maps. Other new additions include HTML image mapping, OGR extension to output WFS as any supported OGR output formats (I get chills thinking of the possibilities), and improvements to GeoExt Styler. If that still doesn’t get you interested, this little tidbit at the end of the post should catch your eye:

Stay tuned for the 1.7.3 release, slated for release in the next month, which will include improvements to?Geo Search, and the official release of the REST configuration API.

Like it or not, Flash is here to stay. ESRI continues to improve their APIs (and not on on the Service Pack schedule) regularly so it might be a good idea to use the feedback channels to get features you want in the next release. So check out ArcGIS API for Flex 1.1 and see what eye candy you can add to your maps.

Flex Gordon to the rescue!

So the ESRI Business Partner Conference and the Developer Summit is coming up and that means that ESRI will be showing the latest releases of their software. In preparation of the DevSummit, ESRI has published new features of ArcGIS 9.3.1. I’m interested to see the faster rendering and map optimization. One thing that did catch my eye:

Upgrading to ArcGIS 9.3.1 does not require uninstalling ArcGIS 9.3.

That should speed the upgrade times up from hours to minutes. Expect 9.1.1?9.3.1 second quarter (April, May, June) 2009.

Google has a new tool that helps developers learn and test code for Google’s JavaScript APIs (similar to Microsoft’s VE Interactive SDK). The interactive AJAX APIs Playgound has an easy interface that allows users to interact with Google’s JavaScript APIs (Visualization, Search, Language, Blogger, Libraries, Maps, Earth, Feeds, and Calendar). Google also open sourced the API playgound so maybe we’ll be seeing more of it with other APIs in the near future (cough ESRI JavaScript API cough).

ESRI seems to have abandoned the event template of the past and gone with a more visually pleasing website that is actually much easier to use. I haven’t checked the videos on the front page for any references to “HTTP Goodness” but I’m sure we’ll run into it during the week.

Consider this a reminder to register and to reserve a hotel.