[A day late b/c I ran out of battery power before I could post this from the convention center- oops!]
I’m sure that some other people have posted a blow-by-blow of the Plenary session, so this is just a collection of thoughts on what I thought was impressive, or will impact me as a developer… Image ServerThe breif synopsis on this is that it reads raw data files, processes the data on the fly (including orthorectification), and spits the data out to your client. And it’s going to be OGC compliant. The demo was really slick. Apparently this is some sort of ESRI re-branding of another product – runmor is that it will ship pre-9.2 (possibly by year end). I’m going to hit the Image server session Wed morning for more info. ArcIMS .NET “site author”??
I will agree that this is a HUGE improvement of the previous site builder. It’s basically a code-gen system with a few settings and it chunks out a .NET website with a canvas, toolbar and other very nice DHTML controls. However, the demo was a little cheezy with the pseudo-Google-pan – but it was clear to anyone that they just returned an image that was larger than the div, and were moving it around inside the div. Still a very cool effort, and a bummer for all those .NET developers who have built their own connectors, canvas and toolbar controlls to fill this gap. Still, let’s hope they will open the source the connector, or at least have a rapid patch cycle to deal with bugs. This was my beef with the previous ActiveX connector – it had bugs and they just never fixed them. Anyhow – I’m sticking with my connector and controls for a while yet. (besides – I built them to be agnostic of the back side – I can work with WMS/ArcIMS/Arc Web Services – whatever can return a map) ArcGIS Server everywhere
Not sure if this is a push to drive sales of this, or just done to showcase how it can be integrated, but AGS was in nearly every demo. Heck I’d love to do more AGS work, so I’m all for everyone getting it, and then needing some consulting to built out the services.
ArcExplorer with “globe” support In what seems to be a very thinly veiled response to Google Earth, this “update” to the ESRI free data viewer is slated to be released in th 9.2 timeframe. Cool. They had to address this, and my main question on this is how expandable is it? Can 3rd parties add in specialized tools? Will it have a subscription model built in? I know that geographic data “wants” to be free, but that’s not realistic, and data providers need to have a revenue stream based around this. I think that this ability would make it more widely adopted – or at least as a option under consideration. Beefy Hardware
There is no question that the demos were impressive both in functionality and performance. Only once did they point out some of the hardware – and Blade server running with 6 blades installed – very cool – where can I get one? (hardware donations gladly accepted!!) . I do believe that you should run the beat gear to show off your stuff, but it may be useful to note what it runningon from time to time. If it takes a $100,000 box/raid to run something for the 1 person demo, what does it take to run for 100 users? Geodatabase Versions
This was breif, and I’m going to seek much more info on this, but it sounded like the geodatabase family is getting a face lift. With 4 versions now – file based, personal, workgroup and enterprise, it’s going to allow more flexibility in deployment. Apparently the personal and workgroup will come with an embedded DBMS – so they will actually be “servers”, and not a file-based DBMS a la Access. I’m guessing this was needed to support the replication which is also coming at 9.2. This seems pretty ambitious for a dot release, but we’ll see.
I had dinner with some ESRI folks who side that at this point the new “personal” and “workgroup” versions are running on the new “tahoe” version of MSDE, although there was much waffling as to if this is the final release architecture.
