ArcIMS died April 11, 2007, the day Arc2Earth Publisher was released. With the ability to serve up even dynamic layers using Virtual Earth, there is no reason to invest any money in ArcIMS anymore. Save the money you would be using licensing ArcIMS and take a look at ArcGIS Server which does bring the promise of modern functionality to ESRI map servers. I mean wouldn’t you rather have this (via Virtual Earth Blog):
than this?
And at a fraction of the cost? Plus given how much of a pain ArcMap Server has been, you can get better utilization of your MXDs with Arc2Earth than you can with ArcMap Server.
By not being able to serve up tiles, ArcIMS is slow, outdated and ugly. Time to move on (and I say this with great regret because I’ve rolled out more ArcIMS sites than I can remember over the years). Invest your time and energy in ArcGIS Server as well other more modern web mapping servers.
59 responses so far ↓
1 J Wallis // Apr 23, 2007 at 10:20 am
Your example only appeals to people who take out of the box functionality of ArcIMS and apply a solution. I would not be caught dead rolling out the default HTML viewer of ArcIMS. Does Arc2Earth have the extent of customization that ArcIMS does?
2 James Fee // Apr 23, 2007 at 10:32 am
Beyond the ability to customize the most popular mapping clients (such as Google Maps, Virtual Earth and OpenLayers), plus the ability to serve KML?
Map Tiles is the key here. Waiting for ArcIMS to generate a new jpg every time is just so 1996.
3 J Wallis // Apr 23, 2007 at 10:40 am
AFAIK I can’t manipulate cartographic elements of those services like VE or GE. Now while the base maps are pretty well done for those sites, I can do this on the fly with AXL statements in ArcIMS.
I have yet to see any sites that do these service blends that have any kind of high powered selection or analysis capability. They are fine for viewing static datasets, but a lot of organizations demand more.
4 James Fee // Apr 23, 2007 at 10:50 am
Sounds like you’ve be better off with AGS than ArcIMS. Sure AXL is easy to manipulate, but its so damn ugly. If you are paying the price for ArcIMS that it costs, you might as well have modern cartography to go with it. *shrug*
5 Craig // Apr 23, 2007 at 10:54 am
I’ll have to agree with James here. ArcIMS has been “dead” for years, its just that ESRI has been charging us maintenance. Think of the profits that ArcIMS must generate for them.
We used to do some complex AXL manipulation with our sites, but since we’ve moved to AGS due to the general uglyness of ArcIMS’ renderers. If ESRI had put some investment into ArcMap server to give it full AXL functionality, maybe we’d be still on ArcIMS, but since 9.2 AGS has been quite the speed demon compared to ArcIMS.
6 Brian Flood // Apr 23, 2007 at 11:28 am
@J Wallis
I think what James is saying is that a large number of map sites rely on predetermined cartography, few will offer the user the ability to change how the map looks. However, there are certainly many sites that do and for those, I would definitely recommend using AGS over ArcIMS.
in A2E, you can alter the symbology of your map just by updating your MXD file and I would argue this is much easier then manually editing ArcXML. Granted, you have to re-export your map tiles but to be honest, all of the speed enhancements you will see in AGS (or MapGuide or caches in front of WMS, or web 2.0 mapping in general) completely rely on pre-rendered tiles, that’s where all the speed comes from.
also, using scheduled exports of maps in combination with definition queries on layers can give you really dynamic maps. We’ll have more demos available that show how this works but think of data in SDE that is constantly changing, each export will show the latest view (or save them and animate over a collection) lastly, there’s nothing stopping you creating a VE viewer that’s wired up to AGS (or some other geospatial backend). again, we’ll have a demo up that shows custom identify tools over the viewers. Between the visualization of the map tile layers and a drilldown into your GIS data, that really does cover a majority of IMS like maps available today
The A2E viewers are also meant to be starters for your own sites, feel free to use them or create your own custom viewer out of them. or, like several of our bigger customers, just use the map tiles in your own implementation
cheers
7 J Wallis // Apr 23, 2007 at 11:55 am
I think a lot of complaints and clamoring for map tiling and caching has come from unoptimized AXL documents. A lot of people scoff and laugh at the ability to serve up rich map documents in the 4 seconds ESRI says it should. However this is entirely possible and doable with a properly tuned AXL and data.
People mistake AXL as a static document. When I talk about alter symbology I am talking about submitting AXL on the fly to allow the end user to change their map symbology -inside the mapping application- I’m well aware of the nuances of doing static AXL symbology edits, and it is easier to do in an MXD, but then again I don’t get all the extra overhead stuffed in an MXD either.
As far as the “general uglyness” of the ArcIMS renderer, this comment baffles me. I’ve rendered the same MXD with ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS ArcMap Server and they look the same to me.
It is a shame that ESRI is phasing out ArcIMS (yes they are) because the overhead that the ADF makes in “wrapping” ArcXML to make it “easier” for non programmers to make web sites is a really a disservice.
In the past I have had a number of people say “wow, how did you get your ArcIMS site to load and respond so fast?” Simple, I spent the time and energy to design a well optimized and quality site, not just slap some stuff together in ArcIMS Author and spit out the HTML site.
ArcIMS has recieved a bad name because a lot of shoddy sites have been thrown out there. At the end of the day all ArcIMS does is recieve and respond to ArcXML statements, it just takes skill to make that communication efficient.
8 James Fee // Apr 23, 2007 at 12:40 pm
@J Wallis: I have never been able to modify ArcMap Server services using AXL. AFAIK you can only turn layers on or off, but not modify their renderers.
GET_SERVICE_INFO does not return the renderer for a layer in an ArcMap Image Service. If you want good looking maps, you need to use ArcMap Server, but if you want to be able to change the renderer on a layer, you can’t use ArcMap Server.
That and waiting 4 seconds for a map is not acceptable anymore. Maps should render in milliseconds, not seconds.
9 milk through nose // Apr 23, 2007 at 12:47 pm
“ArcIMS has recieved a bad name because a lot of shoddy sites have been thrown out there. At the end of the day all ArcIMS does is recieve and respond to ArcXML statements, it just takes skill to make that communication efficient.”
10 J Wallis // Apr 23, 2007 at 1:14 pm
well, just to clarify, ArcIMS ArcMap server is junk. I’m talking about straight ArcIMS image services configured strictly through AXL files. Thereinlies the problem. Most people never figured out how to write decent AXL, so they use ArcMap as a crutch to get their symbology made. I have duplicated the Virtual Earth base map symbology in AXL, and since I already have GDT Dynamap Display, I can render the same images as VE just as fast as it takes to tile. Sure I don’t have the neato “zoom effect” when I roll my mouse wheel, but its pretty good for “1996 technology”. Another thing VE can’t do is spawn a second renderer for a high resolution image suitable for printing.
I can’t get Virtual Earth maps to render in milliseconds, let alone a mashup of multiple services. I can get -pieces- of the map to appear in short order (I wouldn’t call it milliseconds, Internet latency is usually that much), but the entire thing usually takes the same time, or what’s MOST annoying is everything around my AOI renders, and the final tile doesnt come in until MUCH later. Defeats the whole purpose.
My point here is not to zealously defend ArcIMS, but to frame the conversation that ArcIMS isn’t dead by design, its dead for clumsy implementations by organizations who thought the could go buy an off the shelf product and get dazzling maps and interfaces like Mapquest.
11 Donny V. // Apr 23, 2007 at 1:20 pm
I have a bigger problem than ArcIMS dying!!
Why are you using site-meter instead of Google Analytics James?
12 James Fee // Apr 23, 2007 at 1:22 pm
That is the problem. You can’t use modern cartography with AXL as it currently stands. To gain full functionality of AXL you have to write AXL, but in doing so you are limited by the renderers.
I have to call BS. No way you can serve up an ArcIMS image service faster than loading A2E tiles into VE. The tiles are just sitting there locally on the server. Don’t confuse the using of the VE viewer with VE the service.
When was the last time a feature was added to ArcIMS? I can’t recall one since ArcMap Server was released. They still haven’t integrated Personal Geodatabases into AXL let alone File Geodatabases. I have to use a hybrid ArcMap Server/AXL mess to get what I want and that just won’t cut it.
Serving tiles is just so much faster than regenerating the same map over and over again as someone pans across a map. I can’t recommend ArcIMS to any of my clients anymore. It’s all AGS these days.
13 James Fee // Apr 23, 2007 at 1:23 pm
@Donnie V: Because people wanted to see who was visiting. I used to have a page that loaded Google Analytics, but it was just too slow. I’ve been thinking about opening up my server logs to everyone, but I have gotten that interface working yet. So Sitemeter works for everyone now.
14 SKG // Apr 23, 2007 at 1:40 pm
@J Wallis can you give some urls? I’m not on either side really but you talked a big game and now I’m curious.
15 Bill Thorp // Apr 23, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Everytime I hear ArcIMS is dead, I wish I had the same candyland projects everbody else has.
If I wanted to dump data to a large, slick-looking, single-projection tileset, I’d use Zoomify — like I did six years ago.
I happen to need things like fast on-the-fly reprojection or ArcMap client support, making ArcIMS rather ideal.
ArcIMS is dead; but the blood is on ESRI’s hands and no one else’s.
16 Lefty // Apr 23, 2007 at 4:12 pm
“I happen to need things like fast on-the-fly reprojection or ArcMap client support, making ArcIMS rather ideal.“
You don’t need ArcIMS for that or even any ESRI product. ArcMap can use WMS so choose your favorite free open source server and away you go.
17 Bill Thorp // Apr 23, 2007 at 4:26 pm
“ArcMap can use WMS so choose your favorite free open source server and away you go.“
Agreed. I haven’t looked into ArcMap’s WFS support… but agreed. Give me Open Source all day long. I just can’t hang with the “pre-rendered tile cache” crowd.
18 manifold_user // Apr 23, 2007 at 5:37 pm
well….
…ahh, on second thought, forget it..
19 James Fee // Apr 23, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Oh we are a nice bunch.
20 Pseduonode // Apr 23, 2007 at 10:13 pm
J Wallis - we also have GDT/TeleAtlas Dynamap Display. Are you willing to share your AXL symbology code for it? It would really help us out.. perhaps we could trade data or code? Thanks.
21 J Wallis // Apr 24, 2007 at 5:48 am
Sorry, its a piece of intellectual property we use as a competitive advantage. That AXL is an accumulation of over 1000 man hours of tweaking and honing to produce something equivilent to VE base maps in ArcIMS.
Personal geodatabases can’t be supported in ArcIMS due to the inherent file locking and performance issues. File geodatabases won’t be supported because ArcIMS is going away.
On the WMS note…I have discovered that ArcMap doesn’t support WMS services in the same manner as ArcIMS. We have a particular subscription service that we have to manually change the spatial reference on the WMS layer to get proper datum transformation, can’t be done in the Data Frame properties. I like WMS otherwise.
22 Josh S // Apr 24, 2007 at 6:10 am
Is there capability to incorporate the mapping component as well as other functionality (geoprocessing) into a customized, self created user interface website?
23 RW // Apr 24, 2007 at 8:40 am
Tiles vs. ArcIMS - it is really apples and oranges. And actually, it isn’t tiles vs. IMS – it is tiles vs. dynamic generation. It isn’t IMS that is slow – it is dynamic rendering of map data that is slow (compared to pre-tiled services). I haven’t seen production mapping services that aren’t IMS perform any faster. Yes – you’ll find demo site with 1 or two layers that perform fast in their tiny pre-set 300×200 window size – but that isn’t how people run mapping site.
I agree that a well-tuned AXL/dataset will work very well. I run a not-so-well tuned mxd service where flexibility and variability of data win out over performance. Nobody is complaining.
I have dynamic data (updated every few minutes) that I’m serving out in an IMS site with ~50 non-base-map layers. That just can’t be done in a pre-tiled environment. There just isn’t a good way to put a large number of layers on top of those tiled services, be able to look at the attributes/etc.
Sure - a mapping site that has a background map and 1 or two layers in IMS is dumb in this day and age - just stick those layers on top of GM/VE/Yahoo/whatever and make your users happy.
It will be interesting to see at the UC what people have been doing with AGS - from what I hear it is slower - not faster.
IMS has slipped from being a primary mapping platform to a niche product for those with more specialized online mapping needs and a user base that values (or at least needs) features over performance.
24 JW // Apr 24, 2007 at 9:53 am
I’m not sure how James has “rolled out more ArcIMS sites than (he) can remember over the years” as I have probably wrote most of them. I value his opinion as he keeps abreast of the current technology while I keep my nose buried in some program somewhere, but I do see both sides of the equation.
The ability to tile maps for speed would certainly benefit a site that doesn’t require a lot of online manipulation. But as James will remember, when it comes to changing content on the fly you need a dynamic rendering IMS as when we needed to pull building floorplans into a basemap based on the user’s request, instead of opening them in a new window. Currently, I would throw all of these software products out for one that would serve up decent looking maps composed of ESRI data (shape, GDB, SDE, whatever), AutoDesk data (DWG primarily), and imagery. And don’t talk about that MG or MGOS stuff, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
25 KoS // Apr 24, 2007 at 10:02 am
JW…clarification. What does MG and MGOS stand for?
And interesting topic.
KoS
26 JW // Apr 24, 2007 at 10:08 am
Mapguide and MapGuide Open Source, stuff you would think would serve up decent DWGs but seems to pffftt! when it comes to ours.
27 KoS // Apr 24, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Thanks for the clarification. I was having brain-farts, couldn’t think what they stood for. Figured it was map something, couldn’t think of the word guide.
KoS
28 Lefty // Apr 24, 2007 at 7:10 pm
@JW: I think the preferred method would be to combine pre-tiled with some dynamic layers.
e.g. the imagery or the “base map” would be in the background and wouldn’t change, but the dyanamic layers would draw on top of them. No sense waiting for ArcIMS or AGS to draw the same layers over and over again for no reason, eh?
“I value his opinion as he keeps abreast of the current technology while I keep my nose buried in some program somewhere“
So he’s the pretty face?
29 anon // Apr 24, 2007 at 7:12 pm
We’ve had improved performance using tiles and AGS over the previous ArcIMS site. YMMV….
30 Jason Birch // Apr 24, 2007 at 9:15 pm
MapGuide Open Source is definitely not focussed on serving (or consuming) DWGs. Personally, I hate DWG; it’s proprietary, does not provide any mechanisms for normalised data, and seems to change every second year. Some of my worst experiences back when I was working in a primarily ESRI office were with DWG data.
As far as general mapping capabilities, my totally unbiased* opinion is that it’s pretty decent for a product that’s only been in the wild for about a year. And it’s free.
* As some of you know, I am on the MapGuide PSC
31 J Wallis // Apr 25, 2007 at 5:59 am
@Lefty
I can’t pretile a base map when users want the ability to turn off layers or change the symbology of layers in that base map.
32 Brian Flood // Apr 25, 2007 at 6:26 am
@JWallis
You can stack multiple tile layers on top of each other in VE, GM, GE or OL, so the end user could have the ability to turn layers (or similar sets of layers) on/off in the browser. I’ll admit this only works well for a small collection of tile layers but once you have hundreds of layers that your user needs to work with, your best bet is to stay with the traditional IMS server drawn maps anyway. IMO, a combination of tiled and dynamic data is the best scenario (as lefty pointed out)
From our perspective, the main goal of A2E is to provide online mapping functionality to people who *do not have servers at all* In this regard, they are unlike the traditional ArcIMS orgs, they are ArcMap users who don’t really care about the plumbing of an IMS but want/need to get their maps online quickly.
cheers
brian
33 JW // Apr 25, 2007 at 7:47 am
@ Jason Birch
Our current scenario has some architects who only do AutoCad interested in serving up some of their CAD files with GIS in the background, and they specifically did not want an “ESRI solution”. I think MGOS server has a lot of good things in it, albeit the lack of DWG support (I wonder if anyone could integrate DWG support into FDO2FDO), but the WebStudio product has a long way to go. And I am not sure about the image support in MGOS server, it is very cryptic on how you get data into the server. I am sure most of my view is based on my misunderstanding of how it works, but as I rant it seems this may be a better topic under some other blog rather than “the-day-arcims-died”.
34 Lefty // Apr 25, 2007 at 9:05 am
@JW: If there is anything to learn about this blog, it is ever thread is off topic…
35 Xtopolopoquetl // Apr 25, 2007 at 2:44 pm
I’ve never posted to this site before, but I’ve followed many conversations with interest and a chuckle or two. My two cents… ArcIMS is a perfectly serviceable technology for many GIS users. That said, I agree with earlier posts … there’s nothing worse than a poorly implemented IMS site, and that ArcIMS has gotten much of its bad rep from users (or worse consultants) who took the out of the box HTML viewer, slapped their logo on it, and unleashed upon the Internet yet another example of 1990’s state of the art mapping technology. The standard ArcIMS HTML viewer is indeed ugly, as are the simple AXL-driven maps produced by the Authoring application. But guess what? The new “default” .NET based viewer that comes with IMS & AGS is no prize pig either, and the maps generated by AGS are only as good as the effort put into them.
FWIW, with its handling of transparency & anti-aliasing, AXL-based map output can be made that rivals or even surpasses anything AGS can do today. Where it falters is labeling, an area ESRI long ago chose to stop updating, so you can’t get the fine-grained level of control over labels you do in an ArcMap-based file. Speed-wise, AXL services scale very nicely, and well tuned, they provide images at a fast clip to. For an example of what can be done with a decent AXL service wrapped in a decent client application, check out our site: http://gis.co.arapahoe.co.us/website/staging/WebMAPpub It’s not using the bleeding-edge, catch-phrase technologies of today, but it provides a solid mini-GIS application for our internal users and the public at large, and I certainly wouldn’t call the map output ugly.
36 Alvin // Apr 25, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Ugly? No
Limited Cartography? Yes
Slow as shit? Yes (but that is ArcIMS’ fault, not yours)
37 James Fee // Apr 25, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I like the little “recycle” button in the lower right corner. We should have that on all our web apps!
38 Willie // Apr 26, 2007 at 7:03 am
I’m glad IMS is dead. I think a product that requires hours of tweaking to get to work well is not a good product. What is wrong with wanting a product to work out of the box?
39 wee willie II // Apr 26, 2007 at 7:18 am
Wille,
absolutely spot on mate. From a computing standpoint, ESRI has totally lowered the expectations of their users to accept a product like ArcIMS all these years, as well as accepting that a 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, release is basically loaded with bugs.
In addition, they have also convinced their clients to pay huge sums of money for this stuff. What a travesty.
When ArcIMS came out in 2000, it was already behind the technology curve. They were lucky because AutoDesk and Intergraph were unable to get their heads out of their arse and take their products futher (in 2000, Autodesk was streaming vectors over the Internet).
40 JW // Apr 26, 2007 at 8:06 am
Wow, I can’t believe this thread is still going, but I just have to put in my 2 (more) cents after this last one.
Personally, I can’t remember an ESRI release that didn’t have its little quirks, or bugs. That is how we get “features”, but it always was more functional regardless of its problems and quirky interface.
Coming from someone who started on AutoCad 2.58 and Arc/Info on a MiniVax (1988), I think it is amazing the strides that both softwares have made over the years, but one is still predominately for the CAD users and one is still for the GIS users.
Yes, AutoDesk was streaming vectors over the Internet in 2000, and ESRI had to follow suit thereafter to keep up with the Joneses, but who wants to stream their vectors over the internet? I have yet to write a web GIS app that supports vector streaming and it seems that most people that want that would be better served with an intranet app instead of a generic IMS product. Not that I discount the potential of streaming vectors over the internet, for my purposes that has been the slower of the options and unnecessary.
Personally, I think the web map server technology is pretty good from ESRI, AutoDesk, UMN MapServer and others. They can all serve up WMS/WFS. What is needed is better client side interface apps. One that can connect to many servers as needed, and maybe have backup or redundant servers to access when network access is lacking. This would leave the geodata in the hands of those who maintain it, making it always up to date. This app would also provide a caching for base layers, which would be definable by map, as well as for dynamic query for new map content, such as dropping in a different floor plan, or querying out a flood zone type, or veg type. Maybe an open source project, maybe it already exists, don’t know.
Maybe ArcIMS has died, but its impact lives on and continues to inspire new creativity in IMS design.
41 J Wallis // Apr 26, 2007 at 9:32 am
just thought I would finish with a good example of an ArcIMS site. (note this isn’t mine, but it embraces many of the principals I have been talking about).
http://maps.scigis.com/myowasso
You have to click through some disclaimers to get to the map site, but you will get the point.
42 Steven Romalewski // Apr 26, 2007 at 11:20 am
Great discussion. My two cents: one of the best things that Google Maps did was to make map navigation more intuitive by changing mouse actions.
Maybe this is obvious, but I think it’s at least as important as the pre-tiling concept. In other words, instead of having to click a “zoom button” and then activate the map, you move a slider or you double-click the map. Instead of clicking a “hand” button, you simply click+drag on the map itself.
My project manages several ArcIMS sites, and I’ve had any number of conversations with users about how to navigate the maps. When I tell people to select the Zoom button and then click on the map, for example, they don’t get it (or worse, click the “Identify” button and then click the spot they want to identify — “identify, what’s that?”). And now with GM, etc. they don’t need to — they just click away on the map and it does what they want!
But this functionality can certainly be implemented with ArcIMS or most other online mapping systems — it’s just a question of programming a class(es) to achieve this functionality. We’ve begun to do that with a couple of ArcIMS sites using VB.NET, and it’s working ok.
That said, the overall elegance of GM/VE/etc is impressive. Not sure if it’ll supplant clunkier platforms like ArcIMS (I agree with various posts that ArcIMS has its place), but it’s certainly forever changed our industry and the public’s perception of how online maps should work.
43 Jesse // Apr 26, 2007 at 2:21 pm
“That AXL is an accumulation of over 1000 man hours of tweaking and honing to produce something equivilent to VE base maps in ArcIMS.” ~ J. Wallis
This is why I personally don’t like using ArcIMS… After I’ve paid thousands of $ on the license (and thousands of $ on the hardware), if I want to then build an ArcIMS application to the level of VE or GE, I need to put in thousands of man hours tweaking AXL code?
Why do that when I can spend a few hundred bucks on Arc2Earth and have my data up on Google Earth/Virtual Earth within a day? And I don’t have to worry about purchasing, setting up, and maintaining the server myself, tweaking AXL code, fine-tuning ArcIMS, SDE, or ArcGIS Server.
Bye-bye ArcIMS… and good riddance.
44 dijj monkey // Apr 26, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Newbie-ish question: can you limit zoom level in VE?
With web maps I would potentially be creating for clients for public viewing there would likely be sensitivity with data accuracy. So being able to implement scale-apropriate data interaction would be key.
45 Dave Smith // May 1, 2007 at 5:19 am
Aside from the other discussion here, the cost part only seems to be focused on Arc2Earth versus ArcIMS. We are omitting a piece - the cost of VE is not at all trivial.
46 jt // May 1, 2007 at 5:46 am
(to the tune of American Pie)
A long, long, time ago..
I can still remember when,
ESRI products were really fast
And I knew if I had a chance
I could overlay data fast
and make my boss happy for awhile
But Arc 8.0 came to town
with a bloated footprint that brought it down
not a word was spoken - my PC seemd like it had broken
I can’t remember if I cried
when I read the bug report online
something bothered me inside..
..the day, ArcIMS died
So, bye, bye Ee-S-R-I
Your free extensions are now something that I must buy
and old time users feel your salesmen lie
saying “to pay these prices we must really be high”..
thank you, thank you, I’m here all week!
47 oakfish // May 1, 2007 at 8:08 am
@Dave
What are you allowed to do using VE before you have to pay + how much?
48 nadcon // May 1, 2007 at 12:19 pm
nice song. I wonder if Dale and Clint will sing it at the UC this year - LOL!
49 Suzanne @ Plansight // Jun 8, 2007 at 7:50 am
I’m with J Wallis here. ArcIMS out of the box is ugly. But there is soooo much you can do with the AXL. I will not use the ArcMap Server. We’ve come up with some creative ways to convert annotation from many sources (DXF, ArcInfo, Geodatabase, SDE) into something that works really well in an AXL (intellectual property, not sharing that).
Being able to change renderings on the fly using ArcXML, controlling layer availability to users via login (using a master map service), managing scaling to improve performance. All are possible and make ArcIMS a powerful platform! And the spatial analysis tools are unmatched.
Tiling has that “wow” effect. And I’ve begun playing with ways to emulate the “zoom” effect while a new image is generated. But if you compare the time to draw an ArcIMS image and a full tile load, its about the same (when comparing similar data sets).
Here’s some sites we’ve done with ArcIMS:
http://maps.clinton-county.org
http://cityofnovi.plansightgis.com
More examples linked from http://examples.plansightgis.com
50 Suzanne @ Plansight // Jun 8, 2007 at 7:56 am
Ack! The Clinton County link is bad. Use this
http://maps.clinton-county.org/ClintonCountyCX/Disclaimer.htm
51 Danny B // Jul 18, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Although this thread is long dead…
I have been wrestling with AGS vs IMS for too long now. I didn’t want to give up access to the ArcObjects (AGS), nor the dynamic maps (IMS). I think we can all agree that IMS can render dynamic maps much faster than AGS. I finally started building a hybrid site. All mapping and navigation tools are IMS, while all data tools (e.g. identify) use an AGS backend. It has been quite successful.
Argh! This transition period is making me pull my hair out. I just can’t decide which development route will give me the most for my money.
52 PGS@Danny B. // Jul 25, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I’d like to learn more about your hybrid IMS/AGS site. Feel free to contact my e-mail at PGSchindler@gmail.com
53 JeffW // Aug 14, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Sorry folks, after reading through the whole threads, I found no clue what AGS is. Could some one spell it out?
TIA
54 Danny B // Aug 14, 2007 at 1:55 pm
No problem. ArcGIS Server
55 JeffW // Aug 15, 2007 at 7:33 am
Now I see. I thought it was another GIS player.
Having read all this thread, and having been plyingd with ArcGIS, MapInfo, and Oracle Mapviewer, plus GE, GM, VE. I still haven’t seen any tool that can do the same jobs as ArcIMS. I mean serve dynamic contents including fast image layer + other dynamic layers. Sure GM,VE, Yahoo can server fast pregenerated tiles, but they are no-brainer’s work, with little effort, ESRI can easily make it happen. Didn’t you see Oracle has made it happen overnight? The problem with pregenrated tiles is that any changes in the underlying data will make those map useless. Some may say GM/VE/Yahoo can also serve dynamic contents, but can you really add 1+ layers with each having 100+ polygons to a GM and have a good performance(I added just 3 polygons to my GM and it began to struggle)? Can you do those cool customizations ArcIMS can do? GIS is not just about making maps, it is about data preparation, analyzing, management and presentation. I believe all the GIS managment leaders are watching the new boys in GIS. So far I havn’t heard any government agency that are using GM/VE as their GIS front ends, and I don’t think they are fools. I hate the monoply of ESRI/ArcIMS in GIS just like I hate monoply of Microsoft in PC, but I just can not live without them.
By the end of the day, ESRI will still be the Big boy in GIS, Google in Search, Microsoft in PC, Autodesk in CAD, GISers in GIS, programmers in programming, DBAs in DBs … assuming everyone trying their best in doing their job.
56 Xander // Aug 22, 2007 at 4:58 am
Back to an earlier request in the thread… Does anyone have slick TeleAtlas/GDT axl symbology code they are willing to share????
Thx.
57 Ole Seidel // Nov 21, 2007 at 9:56 am
With the server side caching technology we’ve found ArcGIS Server to be much faster than ArcIMS - however tuning the server (and especially your mxd) requires a lot of work.
To help developers to get more performance out of their ArcGIS Server license, we’ve built a performance testing tool enabling users to identify the bottle necks more easily. It’s in beta right now so everyone may take a look.
AGS Performance Tool, download the beta at http://www.alta4.com/beta/beta_agspt.php
Currently, it requires ArcGIS Server Java.
Ole
58 Tim Maddle // Nov 22, 2007 at 11:14 am
This blog entry has to go into some kind of GIS Blog Hall of Fame for the commentary it has inspired.
@Ole, Great looking tool. What I might also suggest is that instead of just having a number of iterations field, you also include the option of sending “X” number of requests per second. I included this in a simple stress-tester tool I created for our ArcIMS services using C# and the .NET HttpRequest and HttpResponse objects and it was really effective in telling me what kind of load our ArcIMS services could deal with before becoming overwhelmed. I just had my program create “X” number of threads per second that sent requests to the ArcIMS Service and analyzed the returned XML. If the returned XML included a valid image url, it incremented the “good” counter. If the returned XML didn’t have a valid url to an image or if it timed out, the error counter was incremented. I then had a separate process that displayed the current tally for good and bad responses each second.
@JeffW, if you still are interested in leveraging one of the mapping services for your own layers, I would strongly suggest you look at MS VE over Google Maps. I started with Google Maps, got a bit frustrated with the performance, then turned to VE. It handles a large number of geometries much better than Google Maps. However, when dealing with large polygon layers, I really think the power is in the fact that you can create tile layer overlays, that take the images generated by ArcIMS, Mapserver, etc, and overlay them on the VE map. In my case, this has given me a great base layer of street maps and aerials and the ability to view layers in 3D.
On the topic of tiling, thus far I have generally used MapServer to dynamically create tiles for VE, but I’m working towards a semi-tiled methodology where farther-out zoom levels are served from tiles, while closer-in zoom levels are served dynamically. That should eliminate the problem that can arise with non-tiled layers - slow performance when zoomed out because of the number of shapes that must be drawn - while avoided one of the real gotcha’s with tiling - the tremendous amount of time it takes to generate tiles for close zoom levels. Again, this is where I love MapServer because its Mapscript API gives you a lot of flexibility.
I would guess something similar could be done using ESRI products using the Custom Datasource. I assume the Custom Datasource is primarily geared toward use with the ESRI .NET ADF client, but I would guess that you actually use it as a proxy for whatever client you develop, even a Flash based client.
I like that AGS has tiling capabilities, but the downside is that you essentially occupy server resources during the tiling process. I don’t think it’s realistic that most people are going to tie up a portion of their server resources for hours on end to create tiles, so it would be nice if AGS 9.3 came up with a semi-tiled datasource right out of the box.
59 Ole Seidel // Nov 23, 2007 at 4:12 am
@Tim: Thanks for your input. We’ll look into including a stress testing / measuring tool into our performance tool. I’ve added your suggestion to our feature with list. You may see its status at: http://www.alta4.com/mantis/view.php?id=1389
Speaking of tiles:
Of course you can use ArcGIS Server to generate the tile cache, however at it may take unpredictably long to do so, your off-peak times (usually nights, weekends) may not be enough to finish the process.
You may think of moving the tile generation over to your desctop. We’ve added tile generation feature to our extension HTML ImageMapper. This way you can use a (relative to AGS cheap) ArcView version and take full advantage of the beautiful catrographic features of ArcMap in you mxd to generate your maps tiles. Then server them up to AGS (FTPing your cache to the server may take a while).
More about tiling and creating map caches: http://www.alta4.com/eng/products_e/im/new_in_ng.php#tile
Ole
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