Link – ArcWeb Public Services – Part 0.3: Something almost usable
Well, after messing around last night and at lunch today, I have a fairly functional mashup using ESRI’s ArcWeb Public Services and PHP.
It’s pretty basic, with simple pan and zoom functionality, and a couple of point layers that you can turn on and off.
Considering you pretty much have to do everything yourself, Walt’s first effort is impressive. Great effort!
Take a look at his mashup here.
Links – Making an ArcWeb Mashup and A simple ArcWeb AJAX map control in PHP
Reading various news articles about mapping around the web it seems that there is a lot of excitement about what are called ‘mashups’. I have not been able to find a formal definition of this but it seems that this is basically when some sort of useful data is ‘mashed’ on top of some mapping service like Google. This most often seems to be point data like locations of bloggers, or events, etc. but sometimes it’s things like images, etc.
Andrea gets into a detailed description of how to create your own ArcWeb mashup using Perl. Besides this he also posted an article on how to create a very simple AJAX map control to stick right on your website. Someone at ESRI should like directly to Andrea’s blog from the Public AWS page so people can see this stuff.
Link – Express Data Tools – v9.0
Can someone at ESRI please clean up the ArcScripts site? Plain as day on the ESRI ArcScripts upload page it says “Not for samples or demos of products sold at Web sites”. There are way too many products that are commercial in there and this latest one takes the cake. 15 days and then you have to buy it, what a joke. If you have to advertise, do it by buying ad space, not polluting the ArcScripts gallery. Geospatial Enterprises is off my list of companies I’ll deal with. XTools Pro 3.0 is also a commercial product that tries to get around by offering some free tools, but it too is just a demo. Someone over at ESRI needs to get serious about cleaning this junk up and off the ArcScripts.
Better yet dynamite it and offer up something like GotDotNet.com where we can collaborate on tools and scripts for ESRI products. Now that would be useful and commercial products such as XTools Pro and Express Data Tools wouldn’t be on there unless they were released as open source.
Note: There is a ton more commercial extensions than those two on the site (specifically ET-Geowizards). Just get them all off please.
Link – Storm Tracker
I had been meaning to blog about the ArcWeb Services Hurricane Tracker, but I got sidetracked at work. How come no one at ESRI blogged it either? In fact, ESRI had a whole site up running with it. Of course no RSS feed means many missed it.
Update – Ray Carnes notes in my comments that it did get released on the RSS feed today. Looks like my reader didn’t pick it up till tonight. Still would have been nice to know about it sooner, but at least they tried. I’ll keep an eye out because it looks like ever more storms are on the way.
Link – Google, ESRI and FUD: Comments
The discussion continues to roll on about the role of ESRI and Google in the future GIS world.
Link – ArcIMS & AJAX
Well, now that everyone and their mother has seen Googlemaps, all I keep hear from my clients is “can you make it pan like googlemaps?”. To be honest, I had thought about doing something exactly like it several years back, but dismissed the idea thinking no one would really want that anyway. Boy, was I wrong.
Jason over at ROK Technologies wants to know if anyone is currently using AJAX with ArcIMS (or ArcGIS Server). We’ve started moving that way with our latest ArcIMS project using AJAX.NET, but we haven’t really progressed far (a little MapObjects project took up some time over the past month). I’m also not really interested in spending too much time developing my own AJAX ArcIMS site since the new ADF with 9.2 should make this all much simpler.
People always compare ESRI to Microsoft and while there are similarities, I’ve always thought of ESRI more like Adobe. Both have professional products that focus on a section of the marketplace and both are very secretive about what goes on inside the company. Well either Hell has frozen over or pigs are flying because Adobe is now blogging. Looking at the comments you can see how happy people are to finally see some news coming out of the product development groups.
If a company such as Adobe can do it, what is holding ESRI back? Take a chance guys, your customers will love you for it.
Link – Shape2KML v1.0 via ArcScripts
Shape2KML works within ArcMap 9.x to convert points, lines, and polygons to KML for viewing and manipulation in Google Earth.
Seems like a very simple method to convert shapefiles to KML. Unfortunately there isn’t any source code to see how this was done and make improvements, but I’m sure any feedback to the author would be appreciated. I’m still on vacation and not near my license manager to check this out so anyone who’s tried it, post in the comments what you think.
Thanks to Ray Carnes for pointing this out to me. Good eye!
**Update – Mike points out in my comments that a VBA script that converts a feature layer into a KML file. It only exports linear features right now (input can be point, poly, line), but at least this one has the souce code. 🙂 **
Link – The Role of ArcPad
David Maguire responded to my post earlier about the purpose of ArcPad and I really can’t argue with any of his points. I guess it is more that I’m looking at this from a different angle than the ESRI ArcPad team is. As a developer I’d just rather have all this built into ArcGIS Engine rather than having to use a second framework (ArcPad Application Builder). If developers could use just one framework for all their GIS applications, that would simplify things so much.
From an end user standpoint there probably isn’t anything really wrong with ArcPad and embedded into Windows CE GPS units, it probably does a better job than previous proprietary programs did.
Link – ESRI and Google and major uphill battle Update – Link seems to be back up now
I usually try and not use FUD in my posts because I think the term has been overused, but in this case I think it is appropriate. Berlin Brown seems to have gone off the deep end in regards to ESRI and the “threat” of Google to their business.
While, there is no doubt that any serious GIS user would consider google maps, not even really GIS. But, google has done things that ESRI and other companies haven’t done. They are agile about their approach. They started with just the street mapping, pre-rendered images and then moved on to satellite imagery.
Of course one would have to ignore the plain fact that ESRI has been producing web mapping applications for probably longer than Google has been a company. Actually the problem has been ESRI hasn’t pushed their web services well enough to the point even GIS professionals didn’t know much about it. People fail to realize that Google Maps is just Beta and to try and build a application around a Beta map service is just asking for trouble (well actually you can’t make money off of your Google Maps applications so that isn’t a fair comparison, ArcWeb Services is really the only solution).
GIS is more than just the image data. You have to worry about the geodatabase schema, uploading data, editing features, on and on.
Google hasn’t touched this yet, but already they have momentum, so it might be possible.
Actually this is the part that Google might never figure out. While at Where 2.0, when Jack Dangermond talked about this, all the Google Maps folks weren’t paying attention. Basically they don’t care or don’t understand this. Google is all about selling ads, not providing services. Anything they do is driven by the need to place ads on the web page. Can you imagine a company such as HP using Google Maps to show locations where to buy their products and have Dell Computer ads show up? Of course that is why this product will never move much beyond either Beta (which means that they can change the product at any time without giving warning to programmers) or it will only be used by “Google Maps Hackers” who just want to place points on a map.
But, here is where ESRI has failed. One: they have not capture the WEB. Two: they are still operating like a big, bad company. High prices, shady reps, no real value, not agile. Eventually, users are going to go from ESRI to Google. Google is not GIS, but if given enough pressure, they could do it. Already, google has mapped the world with limited resources. Do you really think that they can’t help you create a magical GIS shop.
I don’t think ESRI really cares too much about competing with the Yahoo! Maps and Mapquests of the world. They specialize in providing services that others can use for their maps. They haven’t given up on the web, they aren’t in the same consumer space as Google is. Now to call ESRI a big bad company is a little unfair. I’d love to see some backup to support this. I have never had any problem with ESRI consumer reps or support. Heck the fact that you can actually call ESRI over their web mapping tools proves my point about Google. If I need help I’m supposed to post in Google Groups? Not likely! We all know Google Earth is a nice application, but it isn’t even 1/100th of the power of ArcView let alone BusinessMAP. Oh and Google hasn’t mapped the world at all, they have just bought mapping from other companies who all probably use ESRI software to create these maps. Heck even Keyhole was a huge (and probably still is) ESRI user. The “Professional GIS Software” market is so small, I can’t imagine Google wanting to jump into that market and even if they did, how would they provide ads to the desktop? I can’t imagine having to deal with Google Ads in my applications.
Bye, bye ESRI, it has been fun
I’m curious, what products do you expect to move to? Probably none of them will be Google. If you need to perform GIS analysis, there are tons of open source products out there that are wonderful, but none have the Google name on them.
I will even help you guys out. You need GIS momentum. Drop the 1million dollar price tag for software. Opensource some of your products(not all). Market. Embrace the web.
Wow, with an ending like that, how can we seriously take the rest of the post? Sure one could spend a million dollars on ESRI software, but you’d need to purchase a whole lot of product to get there (about 667 copies of ArcView 9.1 would do it). While I do think ESRI should open source Avenue and Map Objects (when they “kill” it), but why should they open the rest? There are tons of great open source software already available if that is the route you want to take. Should ESRI mass market GIS software? I’m not too sure about that, consumers love Google Earth, but why do they love it? Not because they can perform GIS analysis on it, but because they can see pictures of where they lived as a child. You can’t build a business model around that. And there are few companies that have embraced the web as well as ESRI has. They have been producing web based GIS solutions since pretty much day one of the world wide web. Could they market better? I sure think they could, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand their place in the GIS world.
Berlin seems to have bought into the Google hype, but he isn’t looking at what Google is offering. Sure visualizing your data is wonderful, but ESRI is much more than eye candy mapping.