James Fee GIS Blog

I’ve not seen much Google Earth API plugin use that makes me think it is anything more than a way to put 3D pushpins on a webpage, but the latest MapFish demo looks interesting.

There’s a full real-time interaction between MapFish and GE. Translation and rotation of special MapFish tool moves GE camera. Panning and camera tilting on GE side moves MapFish tool.

Just working a little with the JavaScript API and you can do some really neat things.  Nothing unique about MapFish in this example, but if you haven’t been following MapFish lately, you need to put it on your radar.

MapFish on the left, Google Earth API on the right.

The ESRI salesman hits the road to sell the ELA

Google is littered with press releases announcing customers signing up for ESRI Enterprise License Agreements.  Most of these seem to be larger government organizations and corporations.  But what about the Small Municipal and County Government Enterprise License Agreement Program we heard so much about last year?  I’ve heard from a couple people that they’ve had difficulty with the ELA because they don’t “fit” into the program.  As a ESRI Business Partner I am hopeful that this program would allow ESRI customers to get out of antiquated ArcIMS and ArcView 3.x applications and into the more modern ArcGIS 9.3 stuff.  It would appear at least on the surface that it hasn’t been successful but maybe Google isn’t telling the whole story.

Anyone care to comment on the ELA program and its success/failures?

I hope everyone is having a happy New Year’s day.  I personally can’t wait for the year to unfold.  Considering how great 2008 was for geospatial technology, 2009 is sure to amaze us all.

Bill Dollins likes SpatiaLite and he’s been blogging about it and he isn’t the only one either.   How long to someone gets this running on Android or the iPhone (which both already run SQLite)?

So reading the MapDotNet Blog and how UX Studio can load shapefiles (and SDE) into SQL Server 2008 I thought I give it a spin.  You have to download the whole UX platform to get UX Studio so make sure that you do a custom install so that you only get UX Studio (rather than the whole SDK and Web Services).  To load data into SQL Server 2008  is very simple, all you need to do is start up UX Studio and add a shapefile to the project.  Then right click on the shapefile in the data sources panel and select “Export Data”.  You’ll get a dialog that looks like this:

Click for full view

When you click start the file is converted from shapefile to SQL Server 2008 table.  A quick look at the table in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio shows the whole file uploaded perfectly.  What a quick and easy way to convert your shapefiles (and SDE layers) to SQL Server 2008.  

Success!

So there you go, loading data into SQL Server 2008 requires only the free UX Studio. Nice!

I remember years ago having ArcInfo Workstation send emails when it was finished processing and I’ve always thought the next logical step was having it send a text message to my cell phone.  Rafa Gutierrez looked at Twitter for alerts and posted instructions as to how to get your ArcMap Model to send you a tweet when it is finished running.  I’d probably set up a separate private Twitter account so that people can’t see what I’m doing or that I’d spam followers with my overlay analysis.

Letting ArcMap send you tweets

Connor is counting the presents under the tree and I’m getting ready to watch the Hawaii Bowl. It looks like we are going to have a wet Christmas (our version of a white Christmas) so maybe we’ll all hop in the car and drive up to the mountains to enjoy the snow.

I hope everyone who has read my blog this year has a truly Merry Christmas.

There is more going on with OpenLayers and the ESRI REST API than you probably know (I keep finding more and more that I didn’t know about every day).  As more people start using OpenLayers with the ESRI ArcGIS Server we’ll hopefully get it integrated into the OpenLayer code.  For now you can grab some of the code from the OpenLayer Wiki and start using OpenLayers with your ArcGIS Server applications.  People are doing amazing things with OpenLayers including this example with ArcGIS Server (which doesn’t use the REST API, but it is still wonderful) from the Long Island Index.

Wouldn't the ESRI JavaScript API page look better with OpenLayers?

Update (12-24-2008): OpenLayers now has some case studies online as well.

Looks like user presentations are a go at the 2009 ESRI Dev Summit.

At this point, it looks like we’re going to have about 10-15 scheduled slots.  The capacity of the room will be between 50 and 70, so it should end up being a more interactive experience if you want it to be.  This room will be part of the “Showcase” area, which is the central hub of the event.  Then in the weeks leading up to the DevSummit, registered attendees will be able to vote so that particularly popular sessions can be moved into larger capacity rooms.

So get your presentation figured out and submit it.  You have until February 9th to get it in.

Remember OAM? People sort of remember the project and then they can’t figure out what happened to it. Well Christopher Schmidt, fresh off the reboot of SpatialReference.org, is trying to energize the community again.  Even the Wikipedia entry needs work.

The data owner says Go Away!

My wife always complains that she can’t buy me any books because I buy them before she even hears of them.  Well if she wants to surprise me this year, she can take a look at the kite aerial photography gift guide over at MAKE.

I’ll only have to wait for some wind to take up to date aerial photography of areas I’m working on.  Heck and you can take it all on the road with you and amaze your friends.

Even back in 1750 Ben Franklin was an avid kite aerial photographer

The Yahoo! Brickhouse closing put some projects in jeopardy, but apparently Fire Eagle is “alive and well“.

Rest assured that whilst Brickhouse may be gone, Fire Eagle itself lives and thrives within the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group.  Fire Eagle has been, and will continue to be, a core component of Yahoo’s Geo Technology and User Location strategies and we’re committed to developing features, applications and support without interruption.

Fire Eagle and Pipes are two of Yahoo!’s better projects and hopefully the problems at Yahoo! won’t hurt their development.

Amazon S3 Tile Cache loads quicker for everyone

We’ve been loading our tile caches in Amazon S3 for quite some time now and it looks like others are trying to take advantage of the service. I’ve come to the conclusion that using S3 for your tile cache makes a ton of sense for performance and reliability issues. Our S3 tile caches are more reliable than our file servers in serving up the tiles and do it so much faster. Is anyone else noticing the benefits of S3 or has is been problematic for you?

Jack Dangermond was interviewed on CRBonline this week and there was one comment that caught my eye.  When Jack commented on ArcLogistics on mobile, the interviewer asked him this:

Q. Does it run on the iPhone/BlackBerry Storm/Windows Mobile/Google Android? If not, when will it?
A. We’ve standardised on Windows Mobile as a platform that gives us a level of device independence. We are looking at other platforms, but see Windows Mobile as a primary IT platform for professionals.

Yikes, I guess we and our clients won’t be running ArcGIS on their mobile devices in the coming year.

Maxwell Smart uses ArcGIS Server Mobile on the Windows Mobile Platform.

Of course I could be over analyzing Jack’s comments like others are.

Redfin seems to have set off criticism of Microsoft’s VE API.  Their reasons for their move are outlined on their blog and many seem to agree with their conclusions about Microsoft’s and Google’s mapping APIs.  I’m not sure I agree the VE API is much slower than Google’s, but I suppose if you are hypersensitive you’ll notice the difference.  For us it usually is local  network conditions that cause one API to be slower than the other, but YYMV.

Vish does a great job of listing what he is missing from the Virtual Earth API.  Many ESRI users are exposed to these differences in the ArcGIS JavaScript Extenders for Google Maps and Virtual Earth when they move back and forth between them.  I suppose if I had to come out and say which API was our development “standard”, I’d probably go with Google Maps API, but it wouldn’t be enough to call it a preference.  The one feature that keeps us coming back to Virtual Earth is the Bird’s Eye imagery which many of our clients just love (planning and architecture seem to gain much from those, much more than street level imagery taken from a car in traffic).

My biggest problem with Virtual Earth is trying to figure out what the heck the "Live" platform is.

image credit

Running the new ArcGIS License Manager?  You might want to download the latest update from ESRI’s servers.  Those running ArcGIS on laptops should definitely look.

Issues Addressed in this update

• NIM003128 – The ArcGIS License Manager for Windows is now supported without hardware keys.
• NIM006141 – The ArcGIS License Manager is now supported on RedHat and SUSE LINUX.
• NIM000652 – The license manager is losing its connection with the USB key when a laptop goes to sleep, resulting in the failure of the license manager when the laptop ‘wakes up’.
• NIM013222 – A remote user can gain access to files on the license server using the License Manager as a gateway.
• NIM040406 - The AIX License Manager has been updated to support systems running AIX 5.3 ML04 and higher. 

And before you get too excited, license borrowing won’t be implemented until after 9.3.

Looks like Google Map Maker is now available in 164 countries around the world.  If only they’d be less evil and work with OpenStreetMap.  I don’t know about you, but my time is too valuable to give it to Google without compensation.

I always toss a little Google on in the morning when I want to take over the world.

What?  I need to use Flex APIs (and thus GeoWeb 2.0) to do this?

GeoWeb 2.0 would need to be able to answer spatial questions and solve real-life problems in the spatial context—in addition to locating and visualizing data on maps. For example, it should be able to answer questions, like when the fire broke out, taking into account wind direction and speed, which area will be effected by the smoke and how many residents will be effected; or what critical infrastructure needs to be protected. It should also be able to pinpoint the nearest safe shelters for residents likely to be affected, the best evacuation routes; and the best way to setup road blocks so that the least number of U-turns will occur.

Why does someone need to propose GeoWeb 2.0 (other than I’m sure O’Reilly requires appending the 2.0 suffix to any article you write) when we can do everything Zhang outlines with GeoWeb Classic 1.0?  Good grief indeed!

GeoWeb 2.0 - with new Flex

The ArcGIS Server REST[ful] API has been a wonderful addition to the ESRI developer world.  I’ve seen more people talking and deploying RESTful API applications since it was released than I did with 9.2 (YMMV of course).  One thing about it though is there still isn’t a community built around it.  Sure the forums are there, but even those are not as dynamic as they should be.  The Server Resource Page is very static and developers cannot add comments or suggestions to the code examples or the API reference for others to learn by.  I’ll be bringing this up yet once again at the ESRI Developer Summit at what will hopefully be a JavaScript SIG (Not at the same time as the .NET SIG please).

That brings me to OpenLayers and ArcGIS Server.  The RESTful API gives easy access to ESRI ArcGIS Server services to OpenLayers and other APIs, yet there is no way to collaborate such development on the ESRI community pages.  I’d like to see ESRI adopt OpenLayers as readily as they have adopted Flex, Google and Microsoft APIs so that ESRI developers can deliver the applications their clients demand.  There is some really good code floating around there for using ArcGIS Server REST API with OpenLayers, just not where it probably belongs to get ESRI developers started.  For now just head on over to the OpenLayers email list or IRC and get involved.  

Being RESTful with ESRI Server

As everyone now knows, Facebook is the place for ESRI Conference discussions and this one is no different.  Dave Bouwman brought up a great point about ESRI allowing developers to give talks rather than just ESRI speakers (like every other developer conference in the world).  It would appear given feedback on Facebook that this is going to happen (even though rumors were that it wouldn’t) with a “Demo Theater” sized space for speakers to talk to. 

My first thought was this is a bad idea because there won’t be enough room for some speakers, but given the proximity to the Developer Islands, this might make much more sense than stuck in a small conference room down a long dark hall that no one can find.  According to Jim Barry of ESRI, there will be more info and application details in the “next week or two” so start thinking about what you might want to present (or who you’d like to see present).