ArcGIS Server Improvements
The default web mapping client looks great (AJAX, caching). You can work with multiple services at once. WMS, ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server can all be integrated (projection the fly and transparency) as well as ArcWeb Services. Publishing maps with ArcGIS Server is really easy to do. From inside ArcCatalog all you have to do is right click and select publish. Then you can open them up in ArcGIS Explorer. So if you’ve invested all that time creating your ArcMap documents, you can easily share them with users around the world with ArcGIS Explorer (well and ArcGIS Server).
(side note, someone should sell this service for users who don’t have access to an ArcGIS Server)
Of course you can still create custom applications with ArcGIS Server (and you no longer need ArcCatalog to administer AGS). The ArcGIS Server Manager looks so much more polished than what I’ve seen before (I guess we are getting close to the final release). The real power of AGS is the cartographic capabilities. The maps that get generated are just visually impressive. The online editing tools great. Using AJAX you can digitize right on the web client and they get added to your Geodatabase. (you can even snap to existing data layers). Oh and all this can be done with zero programming on the server side.
Replicating SDE between two different locations is really easy (Think Oracle and SQL Express). This can even be done over web services and ArcGIS Server. As easy as clicking on a Synchronize button, you then send the data back and forth. Our company has tons of small offices and sharing SDE Geodatabases has been quite a bit of work for us, now it is very easy.
Just as easy as ArcMap documents, you can publish models to the Internet right out of ArcCatalog. So from inside ArcGIS Explorer you can connect to these model services and use them. So agencies can share these models and allow others to use them (they didn’t mention but I assume you can use these in ArcMap/ArcCatalog also). Sharing models has never really taken off so maybe this will be the kick that gets it started.
James – be sure to get the skinny on licensing. Much of this is well and good, but if they want ??k per socket for licensing the ADF on your web server, how is that gonna fly? Rumor has it that the server is all per-socket pricing (starting with 2) – so if you run SDE/Server/ADF on one box, you’re good, if you break it up (like you’d want to), you’d need to buy more sockets. And I just don’t see that the same price per-socket for ADF as for Server is gonna fly. It would be a drag to see the ADF get crippled because the licensing is prohibitive. Maybe $500 per socket for ADF, but not the same as Server/SDE.
Anyhow – all I’ve heard is rumor so far, and since I’m on there – I’m hoping you can root it all out.
Cheers
Dave
On my list Dave, I gotta figure out this workgroup vs enterprise stuff for each product too.
I just saw a demo of ArcGIS Server this week. Something was mentioned almost in passing that really got MY attention, being a ArcView user – with no hope of getting Editor or Info anytime soon.
If one of our offices had ArcGIS Server setup (which it does), and a copy of ArcInfo – they could create a MXD and add tools available in ArcInfo, but not in ArcView. They could then publish the MXD – and those tools could be accessed by me using ArcView across our WAN. Not sure how this works technically, but the demo seemed to imply that it would work.
Now – maybe the tools only work with the data you’ve loaded into the published ArcInfo MXD (there wasn’t much time to ask questions like this at the demo.) I haven’t used the model builder much to determine how you’d get data from your local ArcView to be an input into a model running remotely on an ArcGIS Server. I guess I could create the MXD with the data I needed to process, transfer it over to the server and have those guys add the ArcInfo tools I needed to use and publish the MXD.
Just wondering if this topic had come up anywhere or you had a chance to try something like this out in the 9.2 versions of ArcGIS Server and ArcInfo/ArcView.
While you can publish a “map”, via an MXD, as far as I know, it just makes the map/data available. You can load this in your local ArcMap (View/Editor/Info), but you’re not going to get any more “tools” (the tools are COM objects, on your box, that talk to your license manager – no getting around that).
Server can be used to publish geoprocessing services as well, and that may be what you saw. This is designed to allow heavy weight processes to run on dedicated high-performance hardware – which likely has high-speed connections to the data. I’m not sure if you can submit local data to be remotely processed, but that may be possible. You can be pretty sure that ESRI has not created a loop hole in their licensing, where by you can get ArcInfo functions in ArcView. And I’d submit that the cost of trying to setup a Server based system to get you access to the Editor/Info level tools will cost you much much more in time/consulting that the actual license!
Cheers,
Dave
using ArcGIS Server can we do following things
We would like a web enabled preferably thin client solutions on J2EE tech stack with Oracle database for the following features: –
1> User can draw new geographical regions on top of base maps (having country, states, city boundaries, road, railline etc.) to create different administrative areas.
2> User can drill down/hyperlink even to the level of 1 meter resolution and can create network assets like Feeder, Distribution Transformer, Poles, Customer Premises etc probably on a raster map
3> All the above information required to be geo coded
4> Consumer Index should be supported
5> User can view different reports either using Oracle Reports/thematic mapping by selecting one or multiple regions/line assets/point assets from the GIS user interface
All the above activities should update not only the GIS database but if required the application database as well.
Please let us know your feedback
Regards
vittal
Once you develop a model in arctool box and publish it as webservice, if i want any changes to be made, is it possible. For example i need to change input parameters for the web service, want to take user given coordinate of a rectange and apply it as a spatial filter.