Just Wait It Might Be Great

UPDATE: Well it looks like it just might be great. I hope it is.

That is what James Fee is seeming to say. He seems to thinking that building our own RESTful interface to ArcGIS Server might be they way to go but not until we at least see what ESRI has developed.

Well I respectfully disagree. I would be willing to bet that whatever ESRI cooks up will NOT be semantic REST but rather some RPC-REST hybrid at best. Trust me, Sean Gillies is going to want to burn the letters E, I, S & R in effigy once their marketing machine gets going. Your going to see REST API all over the place and to add insult to injury, that incorrect term will be used to describe something that is barely RESTful & defiantly not semantic REST  I think we as a community could probably do better than that. (disclaimer:I have absolutely no idea what the REST interface to AGS will look like, I’m purely speculating)

Who among us doesn’t think that a Community Driven, Standards Based Open Source project would do a better job of serving our needs and be more responsive and flexible than what ESRI is cooking up. Waiting for ESRI is like “Waiting for Godot”. If want to directly use the various feature storage formats out there, raster data, or WMS/WFS then there are good open source tools which allow you to do that. However, what if you really want to harness the power of the ArcGIS Server stack and just get it to listen & talk in a wider and more flexible array of languages. Make it so that you can plug in AGS into just about anything out there. AGS is a very powerful tool that should power backend solutions, fire & forget geoprocessing, etc..For this I think a community supported open source solution is going to be the best. I say “strike while the iron is hot”, if we can direct the anger & frustration of the WebADF that is boiling over right now into a more useful purpose then let’s do it now rather than later.