Dev Summit Continues

Day 2 , Wed Mar 21

I was really hanging this morning, for someone who has a beer or glass of wine only occasionally, going beer for beer with professional buisness travelers is never a good idea. But it was free and pretty decent beer so I can’t complain too much.

General Thoughts

I got a whole lot more out of today’s sessions and meetings than the 1st day. The talks I attended went into more depth, the .Net SIG was good, and I took Brian & James’s advice and spent more time talking with devs in the Community center.

A few interesting things I learned in these informal conversations

• ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) will NOT have a custom skining option. You can mess around with some config files and the AGX document to change color themes, but that is about it. So a custom branded AGX that looked completely like your product but was actually AGX under the art, won’t be easily done.
• AGX has no inherent editing capabilities, no area measurement tool and no way to discover any attributes about data sources other than local vector sources. You have to capture mouse events and do that work yourself.
• AGX has no way of directly interperting ArcGIS geometeries, you must provide a map/globe service that is spitting out rasterized data or convert that geometery to E2 geometery yourself.
• ArcWeb Services can add an ArcIMS service & soon an ArcGIS Server service to maps, but GeoRSS feeds, PostGIS, WMS, OGC, local/server stored vectors (shapefiles,PGDB, GDB, SDE, etc) all have to be progamatically adding in by transforming and adding the geometery to the map yourself. The only other way to get those alternate sources in is to intergrate them with ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server. If you do have a WMS you could but it through the OGC/ArcIMS translator servlet and leverage it that way.
• A large number of people have compalined about the highly fragmented documentation, poor indexing, incomplete docs, and lack of community comments on EDN & other ESRI help sites. It may just be conference talk but it looks like at least a few people at ESRI are begining to listen. Time will tell.

Sessions Attended

• Programing Custom Tasks for ArcGIS Explorer
• The task framework is not direct & intuitive. RTFM on that or you will really be lost. Not directly supported formats such as GeoRSS are not terribly difficult to transform into E2 geometeries and create content from a vast array of data sources. Just don’t expect AGX to do that for you. Deploying custom tasks is SUPER easy. Deploying a malicous task is also possible so watch what you download. They are looking for ways to patch that which won’t create Admin required installs. AGX2 is in the works and the more feedback you give them on the forums and directly, the better it will be.
• Special Interest Group: .Net
• A brief marketing talk about MS Visual Studio Team Foundation Server was followed up by Dave Bouwman’s great talk about wrapping feature classes, SDE, & GDB in .Net abstractions using well known code gen techinques from non-spatial DB. It pulled together some of his posts on the subject and made it all look like such a better way to code. I’ve actually used the same techinques on shapefiles using RapTier and either the Jet OleDb or the ESRI OleDb drivers. Shapefiles are not as ammenable to being edited in this manner as PGDB or other real database storage formats are. I can read the data very well and databind on it but updating the gives rather unpredictable results.
• I would strongly recommend visiting Dave’s blog and checking out his talk and an resources it is an exicting concept. It also makes you wonder, why they don’t just offer Dave a position or short-term contract at ESRI to incorporate all they modern coding techniques in at least ArcGIS 10 if not 9.3. When you see simple object property assignments rather than the AO way of doing it and the self policing code it creates, you wonder why in the world would you want to do it the old way.
• James Fee hit on the craziness that is the 9.2 server licensing & the unreasonable expectation to pay 1/2 of the 1st license cost (of ~20k at retail) to put the Web ADF on another machine. He was told, “We know people don’t like it, but that is the business model for today. We may be changing it in future releases but don’t hold your breath” (paraphrasing, not a direct quote).
• Building & Deploying Enterprise Solutions with ArcGIS Server
• Not a lot of good tech meat here, just an eye opening talk about all the hoops & roadblocks that deploying ESRI server products in lerge organizations that don’t conform to ESRI’s way of doing things can cause.
• Developing Custom Web Tasks using the .NET Web ADF
• A lot of technical meat in this session. It went a long way to demonstrate that doing interesting things using this framework is not going to be so easy. You really have to jump through a lot of hoops to make cool things happen, and you have to jump through too many hoops to make super simple things happen. They covered a lot of techniques, tips, & tricks for working with this and I highly recomend veiwing this session on the post-conference web site if available. Especially the code that way demonstrated at the last 3rd of the talk.
• ArcGIS Mobile SDK
• A super energetic talk was presented by Jeff & Mike. They have really worked hard to abstract all the underlying native C++ code into a 1st class .NET SDK. They have built a really nice toolkit for VisStudio & using it and the Mobile 5 libaries, you can get some nice applictions working with a very minimal amount of code. It relies heavily on MapCaches produced by ArcGIS Server and they didn’t go into creating those or pushing them out but I’m hoping to get that info in a later session. This was my favorite talk by ESRI thus far.

UMN Mapserver + MS4W + MrSID = Happy Again

I saw on the Mapserver documentation of supported formats that MrSID and a number of other raster formats were also supported through the use of gdal as a 3rd party component. Well, I had read this to be about the same as Manifold saying that it supported MrSID through 3rd party software. Which was not very well, if at all.

You can preach to me about how uncool MrSID is until you are blue in the face, but the fact is that is the way most of our imagery data comes to us unless we want to pay more or wait for publicly available quarter quads in different formats. And these are mostly large full county mosaics, so decoding or gdal-translating them is a pretty inefficient process. So that’s what I’m stuck with unless I absolutely have to change.

On a lark, I decided to use one of the many sample Mapserver map files and edit it to point to one of the full county sid’s. Bam! Just like that, I now had a WMS image server. I was able to immediately hook it up to UDig and with a bit of experimentation, also hook it into ArcGIS Explorer. This is a ~250mb .sid file and it was being served out by my test server in the same intranet with equal or greater speed than AGX could read the file locally. UDig was even better, it actually displayed the raster faster from Mapserver’s WMS than ArcMap did reading it directly from the disk.

So, for the moment, I’m going to cool off about Manifold (I really didn’t want to have to do that data conversion right now anyway). And I’m going forward with Open Source. I’ll use Mapserver installed from the MS4W package to serve the imagery at least. The data will probably also be from Mapserver but I’ll be using SLD as the cartographic options for polygons and various fill types aren’t directly available in map files alone.

I like ka-Map or MapGuide OS as web-based clients. I’m most excited about using AGX and it’s .NET based custom tasks for a desktop based client.

My only gripe about Mapserver is that there doesn’t seem to be a good way to avoid hand coding some of the map file, unless you use MapScript. Since I installed PHP 5, MapLab doesn’t work very well, and you have to fill all that stuff by hand anyway.

If I have the time (read, not anytime soon), I’d like to make a simple multi-file select data uploader & styler that then writes the actual map file for you. And will automatically attempt to read the projection info and spatial extents of your data.

I probably won’t do much with this until the end of the week, but if I getting a working demo, I’ll defiantly post with pictures about it.

AGXcellent? Not Quite Yet.

I was like a kid in a candy store last night and stayed up way later than I should have when I found out that ArcGIS Explorer was available for download. I’ve really been waiting for this since rumors of it’s existance began.

What I like:

Aggregation of a variety of services and formats.

Native support for MrSID

• I have nearly 150gigs of SIDs for Texas. Various years of NAIP, DOQQ, and Municipality, County, Regionally collected aerial photos. Along with some private source imagery. All of the stuff we use is 2 years or less old. Data quality ranges from 2m CIR to 0.5ft TrueColor. It is all better than what you can get from any of the free web maps and nearly all of it is better than ArcWeb’s DigitalGlobe Standard imagery. We also use some ArcIMS services for some county’s annually updated super high-quality aerial photos. The last thing I want to do is convert all this into ECW or JPG2k. We get updates pretty regularly of different areas so continual data conversion is not something I really want to do either. We have NO budget for ArcIMS or ArcGIS, so finding a way to use our imagery in its existing format has been our biggest challange to distributting our data over the web.

Creation of custom tasks and geoproccessing models

• We want a few very simple editing and feature creation tasks. I don’t need a full suite of GIS tasks. Keep it simple, keep it focused.

Fully skinable

Simple but powerful navigation and interaction methods

All of the above, except the tasks without programming

What needs to improve:

The STREAMING SUCKS!!

• Come on! I’m testing all of this on the same machine and it takes 3-5 times longer to load base imagery than ArcMap 8.3, and guess what, those are being read of the same disc as AGX and AGX is cacheing them. After going to one area, seeing the imagery of it again should be lighting fast, but it is SLOW!
• The ArcGIS Online servers are definately not handling anything nearly as quickly as GE, VE, or Yahoo. That said, even if they were, would we know it? When even local imagery loads slowly, imagery from external sources is like watching a maple syrup race in January.

No easy way to change the styling of imported data sources once they are in.

• Should offer to read .lyr files in addition to shape files. All the styling info it needs, including visiblity scaling has already been recorded there. Why should I have to go through all that again, using unfamilar scales of km or mi above earth’s surface. (By the way to help with that you can use the formula provided in an earlier post)
• Even if you don’t read .lyr files, then you should at least give an easy way to restyle a layer that you have added from a local or external data source. I understand not restyling layers from GIS server, WMS, or KML as they should have all the styling info they need in them. But importing a shape file doesn’t come with any styling info and trial and error of import, delete, re-import just isn’t cool with me.

Label support is poor and much more difficult to manage than in GE, GMap, Yahoo or VE.

Bottom line is that this is NOT going to truly challange GE/VE. This could be a good 3D enabled simple GIS client that is highly customizable without the use restrictions of GE. The general population doesn’t need a true GIS. They want a great GeoVisualization System with the ability to see data they are interested in draped over 3d enabled imagery. AGX is CLEARLY not trying to be this. It is a ArcGIS Server client that can be repurposed for some other uses for those who are above the general masses in thier GIS needs but don’t need a fully functional professional GIS.

That is exactly what I’ve been looking for, but I don’t think there are that many people in this same position. This is going to be a niche product. If they can get the speed up to some reasonable level, I think it will a really good one.

I’m going to see how well this works with Manifold WMS tonight. I’ll definately be posting more about this in the next days and weeks.