GIS Web Developments

Moving to posterous

2010-05-21T16:45:00.000-04:00

New blog, new address, new way for me to create blog posts. I am pretty excited and hopefully I'll be a bit more active once I am there. See you on the flip-side! http://adcon.posterous.com

ESRI ArcGIS Server Cloud Computing Impressions

2010-05-11T09:47:00.001-04:00

How much did you love that obligatory buzz word title? Seriously though, ArcGIS Server isn't designed to work in the cloud, it won't work the way it is set up. There are some ways the "Cloud" can be used and we have recently taken the leap into using it in production and have been pretty impressed. The GeoPRIME framework we use for most of our sites now supports Amazon S3 and cloudfront based tile services, so we can cache a map service and load it into these locations. We created a simple tool we point at the cache on the server and we tell it where we want to put the cache, and then wait a few hours and it is ready to go (it also supports only loading tiles modified after a certain date for data updates)

We've recently started using cname aliases on our cloudfront distribution as well, this had a significant role in increasing speed. (Look up round robin DNS for more information on why this makes things faster). I am pretty excited about the speed we are getting, and our first month's bill was under 100 bucks. You really can't beat this stuff. Leave comments if you want to know more specifics.

Here is a link showing it in action.

New ArcGIS Server Flex Application Built using "GeoPRIME" Framework

2010-04-29T15:41:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago we made this live and things are running pretty well, so I would like to get some feedback from the interwebs and see what everyone thinks. I know I don't have a ton of commenters, but I would appeciate any opinions you might have good or bad.

GeoDecisions created a new framework similar in architecture to the ESRI Flex viewer but different in execution. We are selling the framework called "GeoPRIME" and more information is available here. If you want more information you can also just comment below or send me an email and I will get back to you.

So... What do you think about the user experience, the performance, etc? We had to make some strange concessions since the current version of ArcGIS Server is a bit lacking (no table searches through ArcGIS Server, no related information, things like that).

Long time no talk...

2010-04-28T20:09:00.000-04:00

So it's been a while. I notice my subtitle is News, and commentary. Yeah right, I'm not helping anyone by not saying anything. Look forward to a few posts in the next few days. One about hiring an intern, and what I see as a big lack of skills geography students don't have coming out of school. Another about ArcGIS Server and the Amazon S3 and cloudfront. My impressions and estimated costs now that we have gone live with a very popular site. The third is going to be about ArcGIS Server and the FLEX API and something we have been working on for a long time that is now going to be in a 1.0 version and available for purchase. I am really excited about the last one and I hope some people have some good comments and feedback about all of them. So... watch this space, I promise good things are coming.

Map navigation is simple, DON'T COMPLICATE IT WITH "TOOLS"

2009-10-15T13:03:00.003-04:00

In the past 6 months, I have worked on 8 different mapping applications and in all but one, I have convinced the powers that be to omit the old school style of map navigation "tools".

You know, these:

I will be honest, in IE5, or before Google, Microsoft, Mapquest, and Yahoo all changed their navigation to the new style, these tools made sense. In 2009 they don't. Once I select a zoom in tool, and I want to pan, I never remember to switch to the pan tool, and I end up zooming farther than I want, then I have to go back, and then switch to the pan tool. Huge annoyance.

The ONLY argument I have heard in favor of these old school tools is this:

"The old version of *insert application name here* had these tools."

The old version of your car used leaded gas, the old version of your TV was in black and white, and the old version of your house had lead based paint and asbestos insulation. That reasoning SUCKS. If I can't click and drag at any time and pan around, your navigation is faulty. If I can't use my scroll wheel to zoom in or out, your navigation is faulty. See where I am going here?

If you are naive enough to think your users don't use any other map applications than the old version of your page with antiquated navigation tools, YOU'RE WRONG. Please get your head out of your ass, and move to the new navigation style. you'll never have to explain what a "pan" tool is again.

Silverlight API and Bing Maps

2009-08-26T14:01:00.003-04:00

Just finished up working on a silverlight API application using Bing Maps. This is the first major project I've worked on that used ArcGIS Online instead of ArcGIS Server and everything went pretty smoothly. The client's data sits in SQL server and we query the data using WCF services. I am VERY impressed with the speed and quality of the Bing Maps services, and I was pleasantly surprised by the Silverlight development process. We hit a few snags on some things, printing being the biggest, but had workarounds and got through it. If you are really interested I can send you a link to our demo server if you want to comment below but I don't really want to put the URL out to the public just yet.

New ArcGIS Server App

2009-06-16T09:03:00.003-04:00

I am just wrapping up a deployment for a county in PA. The link to their new site is here The URL may change and I will update this post if it does. It uses the ArcGIS Server JavaScript API. We developed it so it was completed customizable and configurable with one json config file. Next we are going to be setting up a wizard for editing the config file. We are hoping to be able to use this application core for a lot of clients in the future. Let me know what you think

IGIC

2009-04-20T12:41:00.003-04:00

I will be at the Iowa geographic information council (igic) conference in Waterloo, IA this week. I am also presenting on using ArcGIS server for public mapping apps on Wednesday. I know it's not quite the esri devsummit, but I will be tweeting about it using #igic from username adcon . Follow me if you're interested.

ArcGIS Server on the iPhone

2009-02-06T08:21:00.002-05:00

This Link goes to a test I am doing of using the ArcGIS Server JavaScript API on the iPhone(if you go to it in a normal browser, there will be errors, because the iphone events aren't supported). It only displays the map, and allows you to zoom in, out, and pan. I basically covered the map div with a transparent div that I can capture the iphone gestures on, and then manipulate the map.

To zoom in: double tap the screen, or do a reverse "pinch"
To zoom out: pinch your fingers together
to pan: drag 1 finger across the screen

I wish the touchchange event fired more often, so the panning was more fluid, but I'll take what I can get for now. Leave comments below on what you think.

Amazon Web Services Map Cache Hosting

2008-12-16T09:05:00.003-05:00

If you are using the JavaScript, or Flex API's with ArcGIS server you are getting your map cache tiles through the REST API interface. If you dig around through the folder structure on the machine holding the tiles, you will notice that the folder names that match the row and columns are not the same in the REST API as they are on the disk. For example /01/1.jpg from the REST api would be a different file name on the disk.

Every time the map is drawn using one of these 2 API's the ArcGIS server machine must translate /01/1.jpg into the same numbers in hexidecimal. That is not a really huge issue, but if you think about this, the machine has to do this roughly 10 times for every map redraw, and sometimes many more times based on the number of layers that are turned on, and the screen size. Multiply that times 20 users and that is a lot of requests going to the same machine that has to do all the queries, dynamic map redraws, geoprocessing services, etc. I wanted to remove this overhead on the machine resources, disk access, and the bandwidth of the ArcGIS server machine sooooo:

We loaded the tiles to Amazon's S3. This makes things MUCH faster for map redraws and removes a small amount of overhead to let ArcGIS server do the work that only it can do.

The following link was built using the flex api and everything including the swf and html page is loaded up to the Amazon S3 (what you are seeing will not make a single request to the ArcGIS server machine at all). Give it a try and let me know what you think, comment if you notice any slowdowns or other issues. (This can be done with the Javascript API too. )

Link

ESRI Javascript API Application

2008-10-06T16:26:00.002-04:00

We finished this site a while back, but I am just now getting around to posting it here. The client is hosting it themselves, and I am not sure if performance is suffering slightly because of the hardware it is on. Overall though, I am pretty impressed with the performance.

Carver County TRIP

Functionality or Usability

2008-06-25T17:00:00.003-04:00

So which is more important. I think in many GIS applications some folks are so impressed by functions they want as many of them as possible. How many functions do most users ever use? Does adding more functions take away from the experience?

Read this link to a letter Bill Gates sent about usability in windows. Pretty Interesting Stuff.

Give me simple intuitive functions all day long, if I have to think about how to use them... they better be the best thing since sliced bread.

Google Earth in the browser...

2008-05-28T13:50:00.004-04:00

Google Lat-Long Blog just posted about the new Google Earth browser API. This is a great new way to add 3d into any web page. It is very similar to how the virtual earth 3d API works, and it can also work with existing Google maps applications.

With ArcGIS Server Rest API and the KML reflector support from GeoServer, getting data in 3d in the browser is almost "easy."

OpenLayers new features

2008-05-21T19:49:00.005-04:00

OpenLayers recently released its newest version (2.6) with quite a few new features. These include:

-Improved support for google, virtual earth, and yahoo maps layers

-Animated zooming and panning

-Improved vector layer support, including thematic rendering on the client side as shown in the example below

-OpenLayers could be a great base for may of our applications, including those that use the new ESRI rest API

Where are we spending our advertising money?

2008-05-21T16:03:00.004-04:00

CES is the largest trade show of any kind in North America. In 2007 it attracted slightly less than 150,000 atendees. The ESRI User Conference is the worlds largest GIS conference and it attracts close to 15,000

In North America alone, there are over 200,000,000 internet users and every potential client we have uses the internet.

If we were to create an internet buzz, we could attract thousands of visitors to our site in a day. If we create a buzz at a trade show, we can attract maybe a few hundred visitors. The visitors we attract from the internet may not be potential clients, but we also may attract potential clients we had no vector of communication with before.

Where do we spend our money, trade shows, or our corporate web sites? Why are we spending so much money on such limited audiences? Especially if the majority of the work we do is create web sites for our clients?

Let's just take a step back and consider everything we do.

ArcGIS Server 9.3 RC1

2008-05-19T10:12:00.004-04:00

So we are working with a client who wants an easy to use interface for some of their data and they are going to let us use 9.3 and the JavaScript/rest api's. I am really excited about this, and this weekend I was looking for some demos and came across these.

Site Selection Demo

Notification List Demo

I really can't wait to start development on this stuff.

Introducing the Google Maps API for Flash

2008-05-15T14:10:00.006-04:00

As if the google maps api wasn't a slick enough interface from the start, this only makes things better and adds more opportunities.

Official Google Maps API Blog: Introducing the Google Maps API for Flash

Where 2.0 thoughts

2008-05-15T12:37:00.004-04:00

Dave Bouwman has a good article on his blog that is worth reading about the "where 2.0 movement"

Meanwhile back in "GIScience"-land, the hard-core old guard have railed against pushpins as too simple, in-accurate or just lame. Not sure why there is so much insecurity, but maybe it's just a little envy that a bunch of javascript hackers made maps "cool". Many GIS applications have a "captive" audience (i.e. staff who have to use the site to do their job), usability has been low on the list, and performance an after though. The emphasis was placed on trying to cram desktop type work-flows and interaction models into a browser. Needless to say this has its drawbacks.

Read the whole thing

Google Gears and GIS

2008-05-15T08:44:00.006-04:00

This one isn't exactly a GIS technology but it can open up a lot of new application opportunities.

Google Gears allows the creation of 'web" based applications that can run without an internet connection. Once you go to a site created with google gears once, you can then go to that site while not connected to the internet and parts or all of it can still work.

We could create editing applications that then submit their changes back to a server when they are reconnected to the web.

We could create applications that run on the local client machine and don't need to access the server unless updates are made to the application. They would only need to access 'web services' to retrieve data.

There are quite a few things that could be done with this, just another new option we could use to create more powerful and user friendly applications. Our clients don't know any of this stuff is an option so we have to open their eyes to the possibilities these new technologies open up to them.

Google Gears
Example Site

Are we paying attention?

2008-05-14T13:54:00.005-04:00

About 6 months ago, I read a lengthy heated discussion saying that the "geo web" (boy do I hate when that is the best thing we have to call something) isn't true GIS. While I have to say I disagree with that sentiment whole heartedly, I am still surprised to see my boy Jack D. from ESRI giving a presentation with the head of Google's GEO division.

If you have missed this for the last few years... the game is changing and we all need to evolve or become obsolete.

http://blip.tv/file/903438
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943497-7.html

Greetings

2008-05-14T13:52:00.002-04:00

Hi all, I decided to write a blog, we'll see how it goes, and what I decide to write on it.

I thought it might be a good way for me to express what I'm thinking about, working on, or excited to see. Hopefully you find it informative and useful. Leave comments if you want more info, or want me to talk about other stuff.

Here goes,
Adam