Dev Summit Pre-Conference Survey Results…
Posted by Dave Bouwman | Posted in Dev Summit, ESRI | Posted on 14-03-2007
5
ESRI has posted a PDF with summary stats of the Dev Summit pre-conference survey results. I think it’s very cool that they have released this information, and there are a few interesting nuggets in there…
Importance of Blogs as a Resource
I find this pretty suprising, since I believe that if you asked the same question to the much broader .NET developer community, blogs would be in the top 5 – mainly because of the positive impact that the Microsoft developer blogs have had. Since 97% of respondents said that “Developer Resources” are important, I believe that this result simply reflects slow adoption within the GIS community. Despite this result, I hope that ESRI increases blogging by the product teams and professional services.
Developer Technologies
Three things stand out on this one…
ASP.NET Supremacy
ASP.NET seems to be pretty important to almost 80% of the respondents. Since I’m pretty sure that there are still an awful lot of people writing code for desktop, it makes me think that there is a tight correlation between ArcGIS Server developers and a willingness to take on-line surveys.
Visual Basic 6 beats Python, Java….
This suprised me. I loved VB6 when it was the only tool we had to work with, but it’s just so painful compared to using .NET – and the transition to VB.NET is about a smooth as can be – and you can get the Free Express Editions – why why why are you still writing VB6? (I can understand support & maintenance) The fact it beat out Python and Java makes me think that there are not many Python/Java/Perl etc. developers out there.
REST? What’s a REST?
While this is still a fermenting concept, REST architecture is a great way to do simple “servicey” things. I’m glad that ESRI included it on the list, and I think it will move up as more people start grokking it.
you say blogs should be more important, I think people were more focused on the peer-to-peer discussion forums rather than blogs. Doesn’t surprise me much since I think discussion forums allow for more freedom of information exchange. Thoughts?
Steve,
I’m not saying blogs should be #1 on the list, just that I’d rank’em a little higher than "Industry Specific Data Models"!
Forums are very valuable, but they are more focused on responses to questions.
I think that blogs are much better for gaining real insights into how something works – the "zen" if you will. This is because the authors tend to take time to write up something, and in doing so tend to cover it in-depth. Whereas many forum responses are done on the spur of the moment, and thus are not as comprehensive.
Dave
Hi Dave
I think it is not a question that there are much more MS developer vs Java/Python/others, but the reason is that Esri became very MS-oriented.
Its main technology, ArcObjects, is COM, and this is the reason of MS developers majority.
Someone interested in Java development with Esri technology, would be probably only happy with SDE Java Api and ArcIMS. Java ArcObjects is a bridge technology, so if there is a choice, I would obviously go, for performance reason, with MS development.
Paolo,
I totally agree – I should have qualified that statement with "…in the ESRI developer community".
Cheers,
Dave
I think that the whole "blogging" idea is still relatively new to the
I/S community. The Techies in my family "blog" a lot but I don’t think
that it is being thought of as a part of the software development lifecycle just yet.