James Fee GIS Blog

46 responses so far ↓

• 1 Paul // Nov 5, 2007 at 9:39 pm

  Service Pack 4 ….- really?

  ESRI must be proud to reach such a significant milestone…….9.2 was so bad that it needs Four different fixes? They couldn’t get it right the third time - all those months after the initial 9.2 shipped ….. (sigh).

  To be fair - we could call it a push and say that they finally got the 9.0 right - (which minor release was it where the first service pack was only 30 days after the minor release?)

  Most companies just have another minor release to avoid 4 service packs …. does this mean that 9.3 will be “rushed” out ahead of - or behind - the UC next year?

  Oh - gotta go - my uninstall is almost finished; gotta go apply my shiny new service pack…..

• 2 James Fee // Nov 5, 2007 at 9:47 pm

  To be fair Paul, what ESRI calls Service Packs are more than just bug fixes. They add new features with them.

  Personally I think they’d be better off if this was just called 9.2.4 instead of SP4.

  But what do I know?

• 3 Gary // Nov 5, 2007 at 10:10 pm

  Vista support? Not needed since nobody is using it anyway…

• 4 Pete // Nov 5, 2007 at 10:37 pm

  Gary: Hmm… I didn’t know that I didn’t exist.

• 5 Gary // Nov 5, 2007 at 10:40 pm

  

• 6 Jud Aster // Nov 6, 2007 at 3:17 am

  Any improvement is welcome.

  … but what I REALLY need is CAD-comparable speed vector (3D) display inb ArcMap.

• 7 Graeme // Nov 6, 2007 at 4:11 am

  I found this at http://downloads.esri.com/support/downloads/other_/Whats_New_In_ArcGIS_92_Service_Packs-v4.pdf :

  “Service Pack 4 does not add support for Microsoft Windows Vista. We are currently in the process of certifying ArcGIS Desktop, Engine and Server on 32-bit Vista and 64-bit Vista. For the latest information about when Vista support will be available, please see Knowledge Base article 31074:
  http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.techarticles.articleShow&d=31074 “

• 8 Still waiting // Nov 6, 2007 at 8:32 am

  What we REALLY need is the open API for the File Geodatabase that ESRI promised eons ago. Are they really going to make us wait until ArcGIS 10 ?

• 9 Tom Schweich // Nov 6, 2007 at 8:46 am

  Well, I’m running ArcGIS on Vista — it’s sorta like self-flagellation for fun and profit.

  /signed/ Nobody.

• 10 J Wallis // Nov 6, 2007 at 11:50 am

  Everything I’m wanting isn’t coming until v10 anyways. Still, “certification” on running in a 64-bit environment is nice. I can’t wait till we have real 64-bit executables instead of the WOW64 crippleware we have to run now. Gaining access to huge amounts of memory is very important.

  What they should be working on at this point is getting the 32-bit apps at 9.3 to be more multithreaded. We live in a multi core world now.

• 11 Legacy // Nov 6, 2007 at 12:23 pm

  When is version 10 supposed to be released?

• 12 J Wallis // Nov 6, 2007 at 12:45 pm

  2009 -ish

  v9.3 will come at or right before the IUC next year because ESRI loves to talk about a new release at the IUC.

• 13 Cellulose // Nov 6, 2007 at 2:03 pm

  Even Apple has given up on the time-your-product-release-to-major-conferences delivery schedule…

  Though going to the UC can be really depressing since 90% of the “new” stuff won’t be released until months after the UC.

• 14 Tony Battle // Nov 6, 2007 at 2:05 pm

  Why does this application suite seem to be getting heavier and further behind each year? How at this stage can they not be pushing at Vista? Nuts!
  “What we REALLY need is the open API for the File Geodatabase that ESRI promised eons ago”

  What we really need is for someone to stick dynamite reality up the jacksy of ESRI. They are increasingly off the mark. The plot has been lost.

• 15 Legacy // Nov 6, 2007 at 2:15 pm

  Why is the desktop GIS market in a bit of a funk right now? It seems like all the vendors are a bit off the mark right now.

• 16 AA // Nov 6, 2007 at 3:40 pm

  “Why is the desktop GIS market in a bit of a funk right now? It seems like all the vendors are a bit off the mark right now.”

  Because they are all trying to figure out how to address the “disruptive” technologies that Google Earth, Virtual Earth and mash-ups present.

  GIS has been migrating away from “fully developed analysis and cartographic output” to “just in time and just good enough for what’s needed” When’s the last time you heard of anyone developing metadata for a mash-up?

  Unless the GIS vendors get their heads wrapped around the paradigm shift before them they will be rendered increasily irrelavent by the market itself.

• 17 JC // Nov 6, 2007 at 4:28 pm

  Isn’t this suppose to be the POSTGIS support release?

• 18 Cellulose // Nov 6, 2007 at 4:53 pm

  ArcGIS 9.3 is the PostGIS release.

• 19 Tony Battle // Nov 7, 2007 at 12:09 am

  Like a Supertanker: unable to change direction to avert the oncoming tsunami. The GIS world has changed before our eyes. It is now market driven in a way that it was never before. The time is now, and ESRI could really capitalise on the spatial awareness that Google has generated…but hasn’ t yet…and probably won’t.

• 20 John // Nov 7, 2007 at 3:11 am

  The biggest tragedy of ArcGIS is performance, including drawing performance in Layout, table operations, data processing with huge datasets, etc. The second one problem is with raster formats (compressed COT not implemented untill now) and raster display performance - very poor compared to other SW. The third problem is with editing 3D data - 3D snap not implemented for a lot of years… We have 3D data more than 10 years, and ESRI did not implemented 3D snap and 3D editing tools!
  The other issues that are not understandable for me is x64 bit OS support, dual and quad core CPU support - we have these OS and CPUs already couple of years, but ESRI sleeps or something.
  Yes, it’s like that, sad but true.

• 21 Jud Aster // Nov 7, 2007 at 5:42 am

  John your totally right !

  Back on the UC2006, Scott Morehouse said that ESRI is working on new 3D editing tools… We all work with vector data, 90% of the data is not accurate enough. We need them for stereoscopic 3D data capture/edit and QA… sigh

• 22 James Fee // Nov 7, 2007 at 6:17 am

  John: I think 10.x will have the improvements to the video performance. At least that is what I remember from the Dev Summit.

• 23 Jud Aster // Nov 7, 2007 at 8:18 am

  From the ESRI UC07 preconference questions and answers:

  What is ESRI working on beyond 9.3?

  Enhanced display performance. We are rewriting our graphic display engine (replacing the Windows display pipeline). This will increase display performance by many times, provide several new capabilities for cartography, and provide platform independence.

  I sounds good… but what is the exact meaning of “beyond”, v10, 11, 12…

• 24 J Wallis // Nov 7, 2007 at 11:01 am

  I hope that V10 is a complete re write with no backwards application compatibility. We have to reinstall every app at each new release anyways, so if I could gain revolutionary capabilities with breaking backwards compatibility with 8.x and 9.x I’ll gladly do it.

  How many of you are willing to do that? Because that is what is going to have to happen to see any evolution of the desktop GIS.

  And to this comment:

  “GIS has been migrating away from “fully developed analysis and cartographic output” to “just in time and just good enough for what’s needed” When’s the last time you heard of anyone developing metadata for a mash-up?”

  There are so many things wrong with that statement that we need a whole new thread to discuss it.

• 25 Cellulose // Nov 7, 2007 at 11:39 am

  J–

  I’m with you on this one. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that backwards compatibility, taken too far, is self-destructive. At some point, there needs to be a clean break–even if it’s at the expense of some users who will not/cannot upgrade. There are so many examples of this I don’t know where to begin.

  If necessary, translators/interop modules can be designed after-the-fact, but should not impact forward-looking design.

  I for one would be willing to learn a whole new ArcObjects API from scatch if they would just refactor the damn thing so it was sane… or maybe it was natively built for a modern platform (i.e. not COM).

• 26 sstein // Nov 7, 2007 at 12:09 pm

  I think ERSI does what you can do with 100 core devlopers. The rest (3-thousend something) needs to answer phone calls.. do they?

  And maybe 3D editing is not needed by companies that use SAP together with ESRI products. So you may need o screem louder for your features.

  Actually a question on this statement by Toni:
  “The GIS world has changed before our eyes. It is now market driven in a way that it was never before. The time is now, and ESRI could really capitalise on the spatial awareness that Google has generated…but hasn’ t yet…and probably won’t.”

  So what would be your advise? What needs to be done? (asking this not being a Sales professional or MBA.. but being a OSS GIS fan)

• 27 kj // Nov 7, 2007 at 2:26 pm

  “I hope that V10 is a complete re write with no backwards application compatibility…. How many of you are willing to do that? Because that is what is going to have to happen to see any evolution of the desktop GIS.”

  — I do get it, but if that happened I would be pissed, just having remastered a million lines of MO code and making an huge financial investment to do it. Maybe the tradgedy of the commons here.

  I think the better display maybe will just be dynamic display, already available in engine, becoming available everywhere else in ArcGIS. DD is awesome, unlike anything I have seen in any other desktop GIS (not to say its not out there somewhere). At least I hope so, after remastering from MO we found dynamic tracking and map animation to be way worse in ArcGIS engine than in MapObjects - until the second iteration of DD came out at SP3 - but its not trivial to program if you have rolled your own custom layers.

• 28 Tony Battle // Nov 8, 2007 at 12:49 am

  Quote: “So what would be your advise? What needs to be done?”.
  Depends on the business sector you operate in. Certain business sectors are more complex and offer a wider diversity of “alternatives”. At a local level, I would develop a strategy to ensure all data was open and independent of any one particular vendor. Hedge your bets. After all, GIS is not about one application: it can be an architecture of many applications and systems. Ultimately vote with your feet. What will make vendor really bolt upright in fear? Falling sales and a movement away from their “vendor” world. In a wider scale, I believe that the GIS profession needs an independent and open orientated voice: a web location, body, organisation (whatever) that will acknowledge and represent the desires, needs and future aims of all of us. Something structured by which we can beat the vendors into shape. Something proactive. Reactive being waiting for vendors to say “ok we are ready…here’s what we made for you!”.

• 29 Bill // Nov 8, 2007 at 6:33 am

  I think it’s time for a complete re-write as well. I’d like to see it done in native .Net with COM interop a thing of the past (unless it’s COM calling .Net rather than vice versa).

  I’ll stop there because once you start to imagine acomplete re-write, the wish list could crash James’ blog.

• 30 Legacy // Nov 8, 2007 at 11:22 am

  I agree with Bill about removing COM. I hate COM and anything ActiveX. This is one of the reasons I decided against using Manifold. Why on earth do they use a ActiveX control rather than WinForms and WPF? Just say no to COM.

• 31 Donny V. // Nov 8, 2007 at 1:43 pm

  I know getting away from COM would solve about 30% of bugs I find. All the Marshal.ReleaseComObject() stubs and checking to see if I can use it is driving me a little batty. There’s way to much clean up code that needs to be written when your using COM in .NET.

• 32 sstein // Nov 8, 2007 at 4:42 pm

  thanx for your answer Tony

• 33 ChrisW // Nov 11, 2007 at 3:17 am

  I’m a total newbie to ArcGIS desktop which I’m using for an MSc in GIS. I’m pretty disgusted at the inability of ESRI to provide a version of ArcGIS desktop that works on a Vista desktop, but after 20 years as a software developer this seems to be fairly typical for a third-party Windows application with all the brittle dependencies and random updates to the operating system that usually involves. But on the topic of re-writes, I’d have thought they could clean up new markets if they stopped restricting themselves to MS-specific software architecture and adopted a Java-based approach instead. Heck, then they might even be able to offer a *nix version…

  Ah well, dreaming aside, does anybody have any pointers as to how to get ArcGIS desktop 9.2 (educational version) running on Vista Personal edition right now? My college seems to have just thrown its hands up in despair, so any tips from the wider/wiser world would be very welcome. The main problem seems to be an inability to start the licence manager service as far as I can see, and a similar inability to just ignore the service and use the licence file instead.

• 34 Bill // Nov 11, 2007 at 6:32 pm

  But on the topic of re-writes, I’d have thought they could clean up new markets if they stopped restricting themselves to MS-specific software architecture and adopted a Java-based approach instead. Heck, then they might even be able to offer a *nix version…

  The wheel has officially turned full circle. I remember when Arc/Info ran only on Unix platforms and ESRI was getting pounded because they had yet to port to NT. Of course, it was a completely different platform from ArcGIS but still, there was a time when the idea that ESRI would ever be perceived as a Micrsoft-only platform would have been deemed preposterous.

  As for “restricting themselves,” ESRI’s revenue exploded after they jumped to Windows (and that was prior to the 9.2 licensing change). From a business perspective, they’ve probably never regretted it.

• 35 ChrisW // Nov 12, 2007 at 2:58 am

  Hi Bill,

  Thanks for the background info. Still don’t see why it has to be either Windows or Unix, when the technology has been around for years to allow both platforms to be supported. And if I were ESRI I might be looking over my shoulder at the pace of developments on the Unix and/or open-source side of things, where people are making the most of open standards for interfaces etc (e.g. the “uDig” project looks interesting, with a lot of potential). For example, coming from an Oracle/Java background, I find it hard to see why anybody would spend huge amounts of money on ArcSDE if it weren’t for the fact that this seems (I may be wrong) to be the only way to get ArcGIS to talk to an enterprise database.

  ArcGIS is a very sophisticated de facto industry standard package right now, and seems to be way ahead of the competition in terms of its range of functionality, but their MS-style lock-in approach looks kind of shaky to me these days, and things can change awfully fast in IT, as we all know. So if they ever decide to invest in a re-write (we can all dream, can’t we) I hope it includes the idea of cross-platform support, and that is likely to mean Java, rather than the present rat’s nest of MS-specific dependencies.

  But if I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich, eh?

  Cheers,
  Chris

• 36 Bill // Nov 12, 2007 at 5:58 am

  Oh, I agree with you that the technology is there. And you’re right, the OS community has been making stunning advances. I was just struck by the irony of ESRI being seen as locked in to the Microsoft platform.

  Again, from a business perspective, it’s worked out well for them. I also don’t see being tied to Windows necessarily hurting them on the desktop anytime soon. It could be more of a problem in their server products, though.

  But if I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich, eh?

  You and me both.

• 37 Cellulose // Nov 12, 2007 at 9:04 am

  Java is a very poor technology for heavy-weight desktop applications. Just look at the IDE-wars. NetBeans is slow as molasses on anything but the beefiest machines; Eclipse gave up on swing and went to the kludgy, platform-specific SWT library–it has some ugly portability problems.

  Multi-OS support is there for server-based applications (with Java and other techologies), but definatley not the desktop. Performance problems, poor-quality graphics, and portability still plague cross-OS platforms. I don’t think changing languages/libraries will f ix those problem.

  Virtualization is heading towards application-level virtualization… If the major players can continue to make strides in that area and get significant OS integration (think Classic on OSX), we can avoid those wonderful technologies like Swing or X or Tk.

  Who cares if it’s a “Windows” app if you can run it just like your “native” apps?

• 38 J Wallis // Nov 12, 2007 at 2:36 pm

  @ChrisW

  What is Vista Personal Edition?

• 39 ChrisW // Nov 13, 2007 at 3:12 am

  JWallis: “Vista Personal Edition” is what I mistakenly called my Vista Home Premium edition. And I finally got ArcGIS Desktop to talk to the licence manager, so now I’m so much happier and more fulfilled in life :-))

  Cellulose: Don’t want to get into Java vs. The World here, although my experience of Java has not been as negative as yours, and I’m running Eclipse quite happily on Windows and Linux. And you’re right that the implementation language is not necessarily important - QGIS shows that you can provide cross-platform support just as easily with an app written in C++, for example. There are many ways to skin this cat, as you say.

  But my very limited experience of ArcGIS Desktop suggests that it is almost entirely MS-oriented, to the exclusion of all else. If you want to code apps around it, the main support seems to be for .NET, C# and VB scripting, which means your client has to be Windows, at a time when it seems to me that a lot of the most interesting developments and innovations are happening on the Unix/Linux/Java/web-app/open-source side of things.

  Meanwhile ESRI seems to be pricing itself out of the SME market and counting on its big corporate / government contracts just at the time when the technology and growing awareness of/interest in GIS and location-based services are offering lots of potential for smart innovations. I can see why an oil company would use ArcGIS. I can’t see why a public sector client under tight budgetary constraints , or an SME with a smart new idea, would necessarily choose to tie themselves into ArcGIS (and Windows) for new applications, when the industry seems to be moving in a different direction and they might well be able to satisfy their requirements far more cheaply elsewhere. Microsoft can afford to dismiss the (growing?) minority of people who don’t want to use Windows, because it is a mass-market supplier anyway, but I wonder if ESRI can continue to do so in its much smaller market.

• 40 J Wallis // Nov 13, 2007 at 8:31 am

  Ok, so what is an SME? Small Minded Employee? I’m getting lost in the acronym forest.

  Microsoft, when they buy ESRI, will be able to afford to ignore all of the “mash up web 2.0″ crowd because it will own the space. Then they will take ESRI and do to them what they did with Great Plains and turn them into a truly enterprise worthy software package.

• 41 Cellulose // Nov 13, 2007 at 10:14 am

  @ChrisW

  Take a look around. Innovation in Java/Linux/Open-Source is being spurred by Microsoft .NET and related advances… and the same can be said about Microsoft being spurred by everyone else.

  You’ve missed my point with the Eclipse IDE example. It only runs as well as it does with a lot of back-end kludges and ugliness. And when you compare Eclipse or other Java-implemented IDE’s with native-implemented IDE’s, they almost always feel clunkier and have signifcant performance problems.

  Building a large-scale desktop application such as ArcGIS using Java would be painful at best… and in the end, the app would still feel and perform like a poorly written Java app.

• 42 ChrisW // Nov 13, 2007 at 12:47 pm

  JWallis:
  SME = small/medium-sized enterprise. And there seems to be a lot more going on with non-Microsoft GIS than “web 2.0 mash-ups”, especially if you’re in the public sector and looking to break out from the MS licence straitjacket in general. ArcGIS is certainly safe for today, but I wouldn’t be so sure about tomorrow.

  Cellulose:
  A nice rich ecology is indeed fruitful for all, and I accept your point about native apps to some extent, although looking around there are lots of software manufacturers who seem to have shifted over to Java/web front-ends , presumably with the aim of simplifying their development streams while improving cross-platform support, and my own view is that the technology is starting to catch up with this ambition.

  But I guess we’ll just have to agree to differ, eh? Meanwhile, it’s back to the MS/ArcGIS dungeons for me…

• 43 Cellulose // Nov 13, 2007 at 1:57 pm

  I guess we can agree that we’re not talking about the same things. Java/web applications != Java desktop applications.

  I did agree with you earlier that with Server-based applications, the technology was there.

  That said, even apps complex web apps like Google Office != Open Office/MS Office/etc.

• 44 J Wallis // Nov 15, 2007 at 6:24 am

  I got off the phone with my ESRI reps and they said that SP4 WOULD include Vista certification. I could care less, but they are saying it will be supported.

  Oh, and 9.3 isn’t coming until after UC. Bummer.

• 45 Chris // Nov 16, 2007 at 8:12 pm

  9.2 SP4 is now out on the ESRI Support website.
  http://support.esri.com/

• 46 SUBIR MITRA // Mar 17, 2008 at 4:28 am

  Still, no answer when ESRI will provide support for VISTA for its great ARCGIS software! As a consumer, we have it both ways, Thanks Microsoft, Thanks ESRI!

Leave a Comment