I didn’t see much about this out of the 2007 User Conference, but an updated Technical Article spells it out.
ArcGIS 9.2 Desktop and ArcGIS 9.2 Engine are currently undergoing certification on the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system with the 9.2 SP4 release targeted for October/November, 2007. Please note that this certification will not include any of the ArcGIS 9.2 Server products.
That is news to me. Last I heard 9.3 was going to be the first version certified for Vista. A couple things come to mind here. First, those paying yearly maintenance will have Vista support in 2007 (rather than waiting for 9.3 in 2008) and the server stack will not be seeing Vista support at 9.2. Server support isn’t that big of a deal (at least as far as I can see), but on the desktop Vista support this fall is huge (my company is in the process of updating all our workstations and laptops to Vista soon so this is good news for us.
And of course it appears that the days of MapObjects on Windows is over.
MapObjects Windows 2.4 and MapObjects-Java 2.2 and 2.3 are not supported on the Windows Vista. ESRI is not certifying any new environments for MapObjects-Windows and there are no plans to support Vista with MapObjects-Java.
That is a shame really as MO is one of the best things to come out of ESRI ever (note to self, stop paying ESRI maintenance on MapObjects). Time to move to ArcGIS Engine.
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I’m pretty sure this was mentioned in the plenary at the UC. It was thrown in there with “9.3 will be a series of 9.2 service packs that introduce more and more functionality, culminating with a final ‘9.3 service pack’ in 2008″
Just goes to show that I should have been there…
SP4 is new to me though. I hadn’t heard about it until now.
James, poor MapObjects! What are you going to do now?
I could have sworn that ESRI said at the developer conference that desktop apps would be vista certified at SP3. In fact here is the link to the Q&A (scroll down and look at question 6 under ‘Product Releases’). This is a surprise to me because I had not heard of SP4 either and had assumed that everything was good to go with Sp3.
@ Fantom Planet: Maybe CarbonTools?
@Cam W.: Did ESRI say just Desktop at SP3/4 or both Server and Desktop?
James — I agree. MapObjects was probably the best thing ESRI has done for developers….
Last I heard Vista was supposed to be supported in SP3…I wonder if ESRI ran into a snag?
MapObjects – For developers, by developers. It was a fun project to work on and you’d be surprised how much it influenced everything that came afterward.
The biggest surprise will be what comes next and how much it borrows from MO’s core principles…
Jeff, OK, I’ll bite- Surprise me. Will I be able to write standalone apps that can be deployed without the need for license servers/files and/or contacting the mothership?
@James – I didn’t go myself so I’m working from second hand knowledge. What I was told was desktop at SP3 and all ESRI products at 9.3. The link seems to back this up as well..
I too will be saddened by MO’s departure, but it’s not too much of a surprise. MO was great piece of work and I’m surprised that it didn’t take off more than it did. Perhaps the licensing conditions are partly to blame for limiting it’s growth. I’ve never really worked with any other similar products so I don’t know if MO’s licensing was out of line of not, but it always struck me as being a bit too much ($50 per installed application if I remember).
@Cam W.: I’m pretty sure the licensing is the reason. I think they feel they have lost much revenue over the MO licensing given that there was not real check on it.
I do think ArcGIS Engine’s growth has been limited by its license. If you think MO was expensive, Engine is at a minimum 10 times more expensive. At least with Engine though, it is per seat rather than deployment. So you don’t have to pay twice if you have two Engine apps on the same computer (or even use an existing ArcGIS license).
I seem to recall ESRI was telegraphing MOJava’s death since before it was released… By the time MOJava had been released, I thought they had already announced their intention to EOL MOWin.
That was early in my days of joining the Cult of ESRI, but I recall the them talking about the coming Engine product while we were on MOJava beta… everytime we pushed them to add features like Networking, they pushed back with Engine is coming.
Personally, I’m not sad to see it go. Mediocre performance for all of our apps… Couldn’t handle medium sized-rasters very well… Large feature classes were horrible… And it’s support of spatial analysis was almost non-existant. We ended up dragging a full ArcInfo installation around with our MOJava apps… so for us, Engine was a slight improvement….
At least an Engine seat is cheaper than an ArcInfo seat. Unfortunately, N x (33% of a Very_Large_Number) is still a Very_Large_Number.
This does raise an interesting question…
Has anyone heard what the estimated user-base of MOJava actually was over its lifetime?
Well, this just stinks! MapObjects was ESRI’s only real venture into mainstream computing. Good VB developers could “put a map in your app” (as ESRI used to say), and do it for $100.
It looks to me that ESRI has no intention of competing in the Microsoft Office market – and are leaving this to Manifold.
On the other hand, while MO was cool, it was extremely limited (no on-the-fly projections, no topology tools, very limited object model). In this case, Manifold runtime for $100 totally kicks MO’s butt.
ESRI wants to suck off the fat pipe of the Federal government, and have proven that they cannot compete in the $100 market.
I guess this means if you need to develop a small, tight, custom GIS application your best bet is open source—say something like QGIS and Python.
(unbiased comment)
To be fair, MO hasn’t been truly updated since the 20th century.
To be fair, MO hasn’t been truly updated since the 20th century.
yes, which shows you that ESRI is not really interested in users developing tight, MS based applications. Rather, they are interested in users spending a forture on ESRI products.
@Gary: yes, you are correct. And, I hope everyone doing GIS applications does just that, and that ESRI gets wiped off the map.
That giant sucking sound you hear is every potential ESRI user buying something like Manifold, or using something like QGIS. While QGIS doesn’t get any revenue from it, and while Manifold only gets around $250, ESRI loses $10,000 for every one of those sales. It wont take long before these guys are finished!
@poo-poo:
Not only is Manifold left to cover the low-end of the market, eg the Microsoft Office users as it is put here (and that market is 100 fold more important than the niche market classic GIS is currently covering), but with their focus on database integration in 7.x and beyond, they are more and more also sucking life out of the “high-end” (or niche you might say) entreprise class desktop and web based GIS that ESRI is dominant in right now (and even that is debatable as you look at different vertical markets).
@poo-poo: Of course ESRI might have been putting some effort into ArcGIS Engine? I’m going out on a limb and say that ESRI’s integration into Visual Studio is better than Manifold’s (As far as I’ve seen).
Plus I have yet to hear about anyone that I know of leave ESRI totally for open source let along Manifold (I still have yet to experience Manifold in the wild, but then again what do it know?)
@Jeff – do tell
does 10.x in general borrow from MO’s core principles? or just engine?
Of course ESRI might have been putting some effort into ArcGIS Engine?
$100 run time? No, I don’t think so. That was just my point. ESRI had the capability to provide a great solution to developers who could bundle the product. But, they chose to continue to bleed their client base, and that client base is just lapping it up.
My guess is, like Petz says, most of the emerging market areas will be just fine with Manifold or QGIS that they won’t even have to give ESRI a thought.
Plus I have yet to hear about anyone that I know of leave ESRI totally for open source
I agree. But the danger for ESRI is not that people will abandon ESRI totally, but rather only buy one copy. The rest they will use Manifold or QGIS. Therefore, if an organization has 1 ArcGIS and 5 QGIS (or Manifold), then ESRI loses around $50,000!
Well, it’s a little premature to go into details, but the general idea is that a good API doesn’t just happen. Rather than expose any or every internal object, a good API is the result of careful top-down design.
That’s one way that the 10x API will be like MO – an object model designed by developers for developers. The other thing that was great about MO was it was designed with the target development environment in mind instead of being a cross-platform, cross-language, proprietary thing. At that time it was OLE Automation with Visual Basic being the most popular language.
Now, for Windows development anyway, the target is .NET and as anyone who has used ArcObjects with .NET knows, working with COM components is not the best thing in the world. A good .NET API must leverage all or the language features – collections, inheritance, constructors, overloads, etc.
So as we design and build the 10x API we are constantly evaluating its “ease of use” by building the type of client code that we expect developers to write. If the code required to perform a simple task isn’t simple, then we go back and rework the API.
The third thing, which doesn’t really have any relation to MO but will improve things, is that we are actually building the 10x application using the underlying “engine” components. So you won’t have a disconnect when you move from building a 10x extension to a 10x engine application like you might experience today.
Please don’t hurt me, but the Manifold guys always go on about price. ESRI has lots of low cost stuff, and even no cost stuff – AWS APIs are free to use, and you can stand up web apps with them for free in some cases, and you can develop for free and evaluate commercial service with free usage credits – Manifold has no way to stand up a web app for free. ArcGIS Explorer and SDK is free, ArcReader for viewing, printing, distributing, maps and globes is free, and there is much more. So ESRI has some less expensive stuff, and some more expensive stuff than Manifold, thats the point – there is way more stuff. For example, Manifold does not have a mobile GIS beyond cramming a desktop GIS or runtime on a laptop or needing an always on network connection to an IMS. Manifold guys should spend more time talking about the positive – what is good and really cool about manifold, and not as much time painting a picture that one single desktop GIS app is broader and better than ESRI’s entire product line.
@jeff
thanks for the great info. couple questions:
1) at 10x, ArcObjects is still COM at its core right? 2) if so, the api refactoring is for the .Net interop assemblies (kinda like custom assemblies that hide the crufty COM interaction)? or is there a whole new refactored COM api? 3) engine parts – great way to hammer out the rough parts of the api. its sounds like the ArcMap/ArcCat shells will be .Net apps??? 4) if 1 is correct, I’m assuming the old com interfaces will be there too, right? 5) building on 4, how backwards compatible will 10x be?
cheers brian
respected sirn as i have perchased new laptop of LG it has windos vista basic ,when i have installed the soft wear for the tv box usb2.0 it is asking the service pack4 to be installed can you help me in this instalation.
How can we estimate efforts for GIS application development? Are there any standards defined for GIS programmer to generate Lines Of Code per day?
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