The Closing Q&A

Yikes - I just saw this draft from yesterday that I didn’t get posted so pardon the untimeliness of it.

The closing Q&A session was over lunch and was pretty calm. A couple issues were raised that I thought I would mention.

VB6 will not be supported at ArcGIS 9.4 and you should really move to .NET.

The File Geodatabase SDK (or whatever it will be called) has been sidelined and they still need to figure out what it will be. The simple solution everyone would like is for them to just work with the GDAL team and get something written into GDAL/OGR (they did at least mention GDAL on stage). I’m just not sure what the problem is on this and why they don’t want greater use of the File Geodatabase (could be why I’m a consultant and they make money selling software).

Dave Bouwman asked them to stop overselling ArcGIS Server. His comment was well received by everyone out there and those on stage all agreed they need to do a better job giving a realistic picture of what it can do and how quickly you can deploy applications.

There was some worry about the future of ArcIMS. Of course the Web ADF works with IMS, but the picture is pretty clear that you need to start seriously working at migrating to ArcGIS Server. There were quite a bit of ArcIMS folks looking at the RESTful API and the JavaScript API. There is a natural progression from AXL to JSON I believe and being able to see the JSON will better help them understand how it all works. The point is though that you probably need to move on as no new features will be incorporated into ArcIMS.

Bart Kool AidBart Kool Aid

It was the last chance to enjoy an ESRI Squishee


Tags
Thoughts

Date
March 21, 2008