I’ve got one heck of a month planned. I start by visiting a client that I haven’t seen in some time to try and help them get a handle on their GIS. They have been so busy during the past year that they have not had much change to make sure their GIS is as compliant as it needs to be. We’ll spend this week trying to prioritize what datasets they need either cleaned up or created and then go from there. I’ll be home a week, but then I travel to a new client to see what we can do to help them with their web based GIS. The implementation needs to be ESRI based, but we might still get to do some interesting things on the backend with Oracle Spatial. After that, I’m home for a week and then it is off to the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. I’m glad I have those weeks in between to clean up loose ends in the office and check on the progress of existing projects.
Tag: esri
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Improving ESRI Developer Network
Rob Elkins asked me in my previous post about EDN for any suggestion I might have.
- ISO downloads – I’ve come to rely on this for MSDN. Many time while traveling I might need something and I always know I’ll have access to the complete MSDN catalog. I could see where I might want to install another server product on my laptop or reinstall one that screwed up my system. While I love the EDN binder, I can’t imagine carrying it around with me. Also updates could be gotten much quicker than waiting for UPS.
- ArcGIS Desktop – I can see why ESRI didn’t include it with the EDN, but I think to get the full functionality out of ArcGIS Server or ArcGIS Engine, you need ArcInfo/ArcEditor/ArcView. My company has ArcInfo and ArcView, but no ArcEditor. Many of our clients do have Editor and I’d rather have an ArcEditor license to test my applications on. I’m not really sure how this could be implemented, but I do think ArcGIS developers need access to ArcGIS Desktop.
- ArcPad and ArcPad Application Builder – EDN seems to focus on ESRI’s server products (well ArcGIS Engine aside), but why not mobile GIS?
- MapObjects and MapObjects Java – Yea, it isn’t sexy, but MO is and still will be very popular. Adding this to the EDN can only help existing programmers get more out of the products by sharing code and samples via EDN.
- Python – What about scripting? Python is used quite extensively with ArcGIS and I can only assume will increase in the future. The EDN web should focus much upon this to get people caught up who are stuck on VBA and Avenue/AML.
- EDN Magazine – I’d love to see more detailed articles than those that get published in the current ESRI publications.
- Additional EDN website enhancements – I’m sure these will come, but more RSS feeds (so I know when to download those new ISO CDs), webcasts, columns or blogs by EDN staff and “power programmers”. The start is good, but don’t let it slide over the summer. With the User Conference around the bend, the traffic at EDN will grow. New content will keep them there and improve the community for all of us. Heck, who wouldn’t like to see http://blogs.edn.esri.com or something similar. ESRI has very bright people, let them tell us what they know about the development tools and some great new ideas they have come up or have seen.
- EDN User Conference – Why not? Could be just held at Redlands as long as you don’t continue to have earthquakes right under the campus. This would be more technical that the Business Partner Conference.
EDN is still early in its life and I’m sure ESRI has thought long and hard about most of my suggestions before I even knew about EDN. Personally I love it so far as we have finally gotten into ArcGIS Engine development and we’ve only had it for a little over a week.
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A quick look at the ESRI Developer Network (EDN)
I’m quite impressed with ESRI and their EDN. For a first time effort, they really did a great job. I haven’t seen any pictures of what it looks like so I thought I’d upload a couple of our copy. I apologize for the quality of the pictures as the only camera we had left in the office today was quite old.
The front cover of the EDN
Getting started with EDN
The GIS Servers section
Information about GIS Servers
A close look at some of the tabs of the EDN
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Moving away from web based GIS
I’ve noticed an interesting trend during the last year with our clients. Many of them have decided that internally they don’t want web based ESRI ArcIMS or similar products. We’ve worked with them to create either stand alone ESRI MapObjects applications (hopefully we’ll upgrade them to ESRI ArcGIS Engine soon) or just using ESRI ArcPublisher and ESRI ArcReader. The MapObjects applications have been more geared at management who need access to the GIS information, but not the complexity. These applications usually answer “what if” scenarios that we used to program via the web. The clients who request them don’t have or don’t want to invest the money in server side (hardware and software) GIS. Most if not all of the ArcReader implementations we’ve done use ArcSDE to store the data (some even use ArcIMS services). These clients seem to want the added cartography options that can be created with ArcMap that we’ve never really been able to get programming AXL. Printing has also been an issue. While we’ve gotten pretty good with some of our layouts on the web, they just don’t look like the ArcMap products that their GIS teams are creating. With ArcPublisher they can have the exact map their GIS analysts are working on. I’ve just received an RFP from one client that wants to look into the new ArcGlobe features of ArcPublisher which should be perfect for displaying what they want.
I’ve always pushed web based GIS because you don’t need to install software to gain value from it. But it seems with today’s managed computer installs, rolling out ArcReader to all clients isn’t as difficult as it once was. I will say the one feature that ArcPublisher/Reader still doesn’t have is a better “pack and go”. I’d love to see a way to embed the GIS layers in the PMF so that you only need one file to send to people. PDF is a pretty good solution, but sometimes you just want to grab that ID tool and see exactly what the database behind a layer is hiding. Oh well, maybe ESRI ArcGIS 10?
We are still developing web based solutions for clients and are even currently working on an open source solution. I just think some people have been burned by overly complex websites in the past and don’t want the overhead of maintaining them or dealing with another department that might control the webservers.
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More About ESRI ArcIMS 9.1
In my previous post, ESRI ArcIMS 9.1, is there a point? I asked why didn’t ESRI spell out the changes in ArcIMS 9.1. Well I just noticed there is now a whitepaper outlining the changes and new features of ArcIMS 9.1. This is exactly the information I was looking for, but it was buried in ESRI’s support site. If there was ever a reason to have RSS feeds for support, this is it. I’m sure there is much that gets posted in the knowlege base that most users of the support site never see unless they perform a search. I’d love to get feeds of the latest posting of all support site software, Arcscripts and knowlege base/whitepaper articles. That would be killer!
Most of the changes are evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but that is fine. I’d prefer stability on the server side and ArcIMS 9.1 seems to do this. There is only one concern I have:
The ArcXML Guide is provided only in HTML format.
Why do this? Personally I always work off of printed material rather than help or websites for the AXL reference. It doesn’t look like there are many changes in the AXL since 9.0, but the future scares me. Moving from printed manuals to PDF was difficult enough, but not even providing a way for us to print them out on our own just hurts. Hopefully ESRI will revisit this and make sure that in the future PDF manuals are an option.
Tomorrow we’ll start testing our existing ArcIMS 9.0.x applications with 9.1, but I’m guessing they will work without any modifications. I’m looking forward to see how it works.
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ESRI ArcIMS 9.1, is there a point?
Well I’ve had some time to look at our ArcSDE 9.1 and ArcIMS 9.1 and I’m not really sure if either needs to really be upgraded. I think I’ll upgrade ArcSDE because we don’t really do and direct programming with it so I’m sure ArcCatalog can connect fine and I’m sure our existing ArcIMS sites will still work find, but I’m at a loss about what I should do with ArcIMS 9.1. The only really updated part that interests me is support for Tomcat 5. We don’t use ArcIMS on Unix or Linux so its not a big deal that they are at the same level as the Windows support and I don’t really see anthing on ESRI’s site telling me that there is anything new with the .NET or ActiveX connectors. The WMS Connector is something we’ve looked at but its nothing we are currently playing with.
Both my ArcIMS installs are working fine so I figure lets just go with ArcIMS 9.0.x and not play with fire. The what’s new webpages are nice, but I’d love to see something like a changelog or more detailed writeups of what is new.
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ESRI ArcGIS 9.1 Installed
That was easy…
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ESRI, MapObjects and .NET
As I’ve posted here a couple times, we are looking at moving to a complete .NET environment. We’ve not really decided on what tools we’ll use, but that will come probably after we start testing ArcEngine.
I was researching some .NET threads on ESRI’s support site while floating in the pool on a Memorial Day weekend and say this amusing thread over at the ESRI Support site:
Mapobjects dot net version (dead link)
I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be having to explain to people how many COM programmers there are out there in this world. We are moving to .NET, mostly because my programmers prefer the .NET components over COM. We’ve talked about this at great lengths and we plan to keep our maintenance current on MapObjects for at least the next year and most likely until they abandon it because we just don’t see COM going away. BUT, reading the tread there at ESRI, you have to wonder why the “average” ESRI Developer would even think so. Lets just ignore that there are still tons of VB6 and Delphi programmers out there with no plans to move to .NET and focus upon VBA. We’ve created many programs for our clients using Microsoft Access as most people are very comfortable in it. Adding a simple map to is easy using MapObjects and I can’t imagine having to create a .NET application to do the same thing. VBA, while not one of my favorite development environments, is going to be here for years to come. Yet people seem to think that just because Microsoft is pushing .NET, that COM will go away.
The future is murky when it comes to programming languages. What is popular one year, becomes forgotten the next. If I was a betting man though, I’d assume COM will be around for years to come and probably in one for or another might even outlast .NET. For some of these VB6 programmers, you’ll never get them to upgrade to .NET and why should they? Simple is better, I’d take a small footprint (in file size and memory) COM program, over a bulky .NET application almost every day.
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RSS Feeds for ESRI
Tucked down in a post about Federal Computer Weekly, Brian Goldin wrote (dead-link):
Speaking of RSS – anyone want more RSS reeds at ESRI? How about on the EDN site? If you haven’t noticed Microsoft has just added 100s of knowledgebase rss feeds.
I’ve always thought ESRI has been a little behind the times with their websites. It took forever for them to put the knowlegebase online and they still release news by email. It should be as simple as publishing an RSS feed and letting all of us read is immediately. Hopefully they’ll get on board as it doesn’t take much to publish the feed and we all know ESRI has some pretty bright XML programmers over there.
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ESRI ArcGIS 9.1 is here
Of course UPS shows up at 5pm on the Friday before a 3 day weekend. Somehow I was able to not stay late and install ArcINFO, ArcIMS and ArcSDE 9.1 to play with. I must be getting older and wiser as this doesn’t sound a thing like me.
I’ll have to wait until Tuesday to see what happens.