Dapple, Based on NASA World Wind
Chad Zimmerman pointed me to the new release of Dapple. I have to say, I am impressed. Here Geosoft took the open source code of NASA World Wind and modified it to better meet the needs of their users. I mean you could create your own Geographic Exploration System (GES) from scratch, but it makes much more business sense to take an existing open source GES and modify it for your own needs and in turn improve the whole open source project as a whole. One could work within the Google Earth universe, but that limits you as to what you can do on the client side. At some point ESRI will release ArcGIS Explorer and its API, but you still don’t have the kind of control over the project as you would with an open source GES such as NASA World Wind.
Well back to Dapple, the GUI seems definitely inspired by Google Earth which is a good thing to make users feel at home. No matter how pretty the NASA World Wind interface looks, I know that many are scared off from the non-Windows appearance that it gives off. I like how the table of contents of the map services is laid out, how easy it is to set transparency. I was creating pretty cool maps in no time. The improved WMS support gives you so much more ability to overlay map services that you can find on the Internet. I’d like to see some ArcIMS support as I’d still wager that ArcIMS dominates the web mapping field (at least in the areas I’m familiar with, I don’t get to Canada too much).
I’m going to spend some time this week checking out Dapple and see what it can do. I’ll probably also take a look at SERVIR-VIZ which was posted in the comments of this blog. The only drawback I see is that it requires you to uninstall any previous SERVIR-VIZ (not a problem) or NASA World Wind (big problem) on your computer.
[...] Anyway, James Fee has posted a quick review of it which might help evaluate it (except he seems to think people will be “scared off from the non-Windows appearance that it gives off,” which is either testament to how well the NASA guys designed the WorldWind GUI [is that a magnified dock hanging from the title bar?] or how self-restrictive Windows adherents are). [...]
Actually, SERVIR-VIZ can run with World Wind running. Had several people verify that there isn’t a conflict.
I can’t get Dapple to run myself.. it freezes on load so going to try uninstalling dapple and .net 2.0 and reinstall both and see if that works. Otherwise.. I have them stumped
I’ll give SERVIR-VIZ a try.
What I didn’t like about Dapple is that it required me to install Direct-X 9. I almost canceled the install when I saw it downloading it.
Dapple installs and runs fine on my system.But can’t get it to build on my system due to the DirectX version conflict.
Better luck all.
Here is my summary http://whatnick.blogspot.com/2006/07/worldwind-forks.html
If you spot more WW derivatives let us know
James – you have a lot of ESRI experience. Are we able to access ArcIMS sites that interest you from Dapple using the WMS capabilities of ArcIMS? This was our assumption, but it should be verified. Maybe someone else out there has experience to share?
WMS works perfectly with Worldwind. Not sure about dapple. ESRI WMS connector is case sensitive and can be an issue. Wish ESRI fixes it.
SERVIR-VIZ has incorporated an easy to use WMS functionality which is derived from the CarbonTools WMS .NET code. Similar to the GAIA client, it allows you to enter a WMS URL, whether it be an ArcIMS map service served up with the WMS connector, or whether it is some other WMS server. You choose a URL, a map layer, and hit a button to add the layer to the 3D view. You can also change the scale dependency if your map service doesn’t already define it.
Dan