REST & Mashups

REST

It was packed, and naturally people more vocal than me have already posted (the first link, James Fee's, is especially good at explaining the technology).

Some notes:

• The structure to access layers is well-defined, but a little human-unreadable (admittedly, it's a programming interface). It'd be nice to address a layer by an alias (and possibly not have to worry about a reordering of the map document breaking everyone's programs)


• One of the things I'm interested in is a possible replacement for the IMS Metadata Service. I haven't taken a look at the metadata delivered, but I'll bet any replacement simply leverages the information published through the REST service.


• The 9.3 release will be read-only, with writing probably(?) in 9.4


• True curves (i.e. arcs) are densified (changed to line segments) when served out. While I wasn't completely clear on it, it sounded like that was standard across the ADF (or I'm being wishful; it currently causes a small failure).

Mashups

Another good session. Dave Bouwman has another good review up. I'd say it's even simpler than what Dave makes it out to be, but then again, I started off programming for money as a webmaster in grad school. I will need to dive into Dojo some more- I haven't done complex sites very recently. Dave's point about simple sites is right- and the biggest message I'm hearing from my clients- we need specialty apps that get the data across clearly.

A lot of the Q & A was taken up trying to nail home the fact that javascript is a client-side language! Once the data is transferred to the user, the server doesn't touch it unless it's uploaded back (which isn't completely out-of-the box).