Brian Goldin Has Some Ideas to Get Started on ArcWeb
Link - Public ArcWeb Services is HUGE
This is HUGE opportunity for developers and something that probably hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Now you’ll be able to add some great services to your app and guess what you won’t have to worry about us slapping ads in there and later if you want to leverage some of more advanced capabilities you’re good to go. To make this a slam dunk it’ll have to be super easy to sign-up just like it is already for the eval. Now let’s start building some mashups with ArcWeb just like we’ve got with google.
As I said earlier today, I was quite surprised that no one clapped over the ArcWeb Services announcement. Well I for one will start trying to get some cool mashups with ArcWeb services.
I’m not sure if anyone at ESRI has thought about this, but releasing this for free is sure to help improve ArcWeb Services. How about adding an area at EDN for people to upload their code much like SourceForge.net? This would allow people to take collaborate on coding some really neat projects. The ArcScripts site needs to be updated. It was great for Avenue scripts, but not for posting code from today’s applications. Also, how about clearing out those “evaluation” products such at XTools Pro, everything on that site should be free and open and shouldn’t require people to pay for part of the product. I don’t think that was why ArcScripts what created in the first place. There should be a place on ESRI’s site to download such products, but it should be separate from the free and open scripts and code.
The problem with support.esri is its lack of community. Very few forums has any activity to write home about and arcscripts still contains about 90% avenue scripts written in 1999.
I guess thats what happens when you move towards promoting corporate level support rather than low level community freebies. Google employees in particular pay attention to the casual users, whereas (at least it seems) that ESRI leaves that work up to their other commited MVP users. Often this results in 100’s of questions, and a trickle of answers inbetween.
Is it actually possible to talk to the ArcWeb server with nothing but Javscript? All I see in their docs are SOAP, Webmethods, etc.
Google Maps wins for instant gratification, but if someone can shed some light on talking to ArcWeb in Javascript, we’d all appreciate it.
With ArcWeb Services 2005 you should be able to do everything with Javascript. I talked to Andrea Rosso and he is aware that many people just want to run maps from within a static html page. All I can say is keep an eye out here for more info on when AWS 2005 will be released.
Google Maps API will always be quicker to create simple mashups, but when you want to do more comlicated mapping, AWS will fit the bill. I’m hoping that ESRI will post some more “demos” of the service with code so we can see how these maps are created and get ready for when AWS 2005 arrives.