James Fee GIS Blog

Ed Katibah, who has a long history with IBM and Informix and is now the spatial project manager for Microsoft’s SQL Server, is blogging.
Ed on Spatial

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Blog reader Mike emailed this link to me and said that he thought it was well written. I agree, I think if you’ve been having difficulty understanding how map tiles work, this is a great primer to grasping the concepts. Map tiles are critical to getting performance on your web mapping applications and [...]

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Now this is exciting.
With our new WPF and Silverlight 2.0 map controls, developers and designers will soon be able to build rich interactive mapping applications for the desktop and web. In our opinion, WPF and Silverlight 2.0 take giant leap forward from other user interface technologies such as Windows Forms, Java, Flash, JavaScript [...]

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Peter Batty poses an interesting question:
If you could do geospatial analysis 50 to 100 times faster than you can today, what compelling new things would this enable you to do? And yes, I mean 50 to 100 times faster, not 50 to 100 percent faster!
Just think about that for a minute, it blows one’s mind. [...]

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ESRI’s ArcGIS Server RESTful API docs are now available on the web. Now I really want the ArcGIS Server 9.3 Beta to ship tomorrow.

HT: ROK Technologies ESRI Developer Blog
Update: Looks like this wasn’t supposed to be out in the public as ESRI pulled it down for some reason.

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Between traveling to Denver for FRUGOS-apalooza, getting sick from my son, vacation and now a root canal; it has been quite the week for me. I’m back in the office putting the finishing touches on a proposal that I should have finished last week. I hope to catch back up on blogging in [...]

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Paolo Corti has written up his introduction to FeatureServer.
So I decided to spend a day for installing and testing [FeatureServer], without thinking of the lack of documentation (FeatureServer is still a young project, so no wonder here if the only way to get infos is digging in the source code and posting to the mailing [...]

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Looks like I’ve run out of disk space with my blog and the database is confused. Comments seem to have disappeared and reappeared at will. On top of it, my son seems to have given me his flu cold (I took one for the team and stayed home with him today, but I’m [...]

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The Open Thread has pretty much fallen into a petty argument about if Google Maps is a “GIS” or not so lets break away from that and focus on the issue that seems to have come out of that discussion.
Dimitri hit on some of his feelings about open projects and the open source community here [...]

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I’ve been totally swamped this week so posting has been very light. How about an open thread to keep things rolling?

The crowd is ready to attack

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I’ve been following the discussion on the OSGeo mailing list about setting up an “open source jobs list” and it looks like it is now live.
FOSS4G Related Jobs and Resumes
I’m not sure why they feel the need for such a list rather than work with existing job posting sites, but I guess this has to [...]

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I’m traveling this week to the hinterlands of Arizona for some marketing so posting will be very light, but Paul is filling in very nicely with some of the points that needed to be addressed from the discussion last week. He’s got a great point about skills already existing for using open source software:

PostGIS: [...]

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Chris Spagnuolo has a survey up to figure out the level of agile adoption in the GIS world. It didn’t take me long to fill the survey out and you can help a fellow blogger out by taking 2-3 minutes to fill it out.

Get agile baby!

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ESRI has posted an example of the Javascript API on their blog:
Today, we just want to talk a bit about the new ArcGIS JavaScript and REST APIs. We built this new JavaScript API because many of you have asked for a simple way to share your GIS data and tools over the internet. Here is [...]

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Thanks to reader “KipterUh” my blog now has a translator available to convert my rants into many other languages. Click on the flag on the sidebar that matches the language you want to read my blog in and enjoy. What is nice about the translator is that you can bookmark the links so [...]

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I don’t like the term “ESRI Shop”. Both open source developers and ESRI developers use it as an excuse one way or another. Just because you are running ArcMap or ArcGIS Server, doesn’t mean that you can’t explore open source GIS software and in fact you might be surprised how it makes your [...]

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I’ve made my reservations to visit Denver, CO to Frugosapalooza 2008 on Tuesday February 19th at Forest Room 5. Should be great hooking up with everyone in Colorado I have yet to meet yet and see some of the interesting things folks are doing with Open Source. I know Sean will be there [...]

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OK here is the other part of the ArcGIS Server 9.3 release that most of us will be interested in; the Javascript API. Jeremy Bartley and Jayant Sai talk a little about the Javascript API in their podcast. Much like the RESTful API Podcast, there isn’t much meat here, but at least you [...]

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Dave Bouwman has cleaned up his AGS Virtual Earth Tile Server and has posted the code.

HttpHandler (.ashx)that responds to Tile requests from Virtual Earth
Supports multiple layers/map services through the same handler
ArcGIS Server Tile Provider uses the AGS SOAP API (fast!)
Projects the data - can be used with any ArcGIS Server map service
Extensible design allows [...]

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Matt Perry wonders if command line is a dying art. He lists automation, repeatability, documentability, accessibility, and accuracy as factors to consider in using command line tools over their GUI counterparts.
All the factors Matt considered for command line over GUI can be addressed if you use diagramming software. ESRI’s Model Builder and Safe’s [...]

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