Dev Summit Wednesday Sessions

Architecting ArcGIS Server Solutions for Performance and Scalability

A series of tidbits, a few of which were useful (depended on your experience with serving map services). I wish they would have spent more time on computer/network architecture for hosting web services & apps- for me, the computers are the relatively scarce resource (especially when licensing per computer comes in), so we need to be able to figure out the best use of our computers.

Flex API Preview

Due to demand, this got moved over to a conference room, as opposed to a demo theater. I stayed a little while, but got enough of a gist: it looks to be pretty much a Flex wrapper for the REST API (I'm willing to be corrected if they showed stuff beyond the standard REST capabilities; I was in the session for all of 10 minutes because it was during a sit-down lunch.

This session re-enforced the big takeaway from the conference- Clients are whatever platform you want them to be with ArcGIS Server 9.3. By now, I'm sure there's some interface for ALGOL that can take advantage of the REST API (there better be, since it's http-based). The challenge for a development shop is to identify the 2-4 platforms (depending on the size of the shop) that they'll use to develop and actively keep the others out-of-bounds; otherwise, you can't adequately develop depth of programming to do good apps.

Building .NET Applications Using the ArcGIS Server Web ADF and ASP.NET AJAX

I was really excited to go to this session (I haven;t been to previous incarnations). Picking up from Dave Bouwman's comments, it really felt like REST let the air out of the room on this. The .NET Web ADF still allows pretty good access out of the box to heftier web services, but it's just about obvious that a lot of the energy is going to be over in the Javascript side of the camp. Still, the improvements in 9.3, which uses the Microsoft AJAX framework are pretty significant and much appreciated.

Building and Extending Tasks for ArcGIS Server .NET Web Applications

This session left me feeling more positive about the .Net Platform. I haven't developed any tasks yet, so the walkthroughs provided were extremely helpful. It also showed how the .Net ADF can continue- it provides a nice near-WYSIWIG interface for organizations with no programmers to continue to create & support (with outside code help) web mapping applications. Also, at 9.3, creating a task on a one-off basis becomes a lot easier by creating a web control & loading it as a tool, which will lesson the onus of developing a tool & Visual Studio configuration & web configuration interfaces.

Other

I had a good talk with ESRI Staff on geocoding; since I work for a local government, we're interested in maintaining our own, very particular address locators and had some problems tweaking them. I also got a good amount of time with the ArcPad team- I already love ArcPad as a mobile client (our people can be out in the field with no telecom access easily available), and it's only going to get better with 7.2.