Esri Developer Summit Wrap-up
We had a great time at this year’s Dev Summit. It’s a huge conference with a lot of concurrent sessions. There’s no way we could cover it all, but here are some of the highlights:
A Few Esri Announcements
1. ArcGIS API for JavaScript 2.8 is out.
2. An update to Public Information Map was released too. This template is a little known gem for Esri JavaScript developers. It has features (like client side clustering) not in the core API, and it was written with input from the Esri JavaScript dev team. If you are looking for guidance on ArcGIS JavaScript best practices, Public Information Map is a good sample to check out.
3. ArcGIS Runtime is coming to Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile platforms. No longer is Esri going to split the platform into “Desktop” and “Non-Desktop” categories. The goal now is to have a core C++ runtime that enables ArcGIS on everything from Android and iOS to Redhat servers and Windows desktops. Seeing demos of ArcGIS on Linux and OSX was really cool. And oh yeah, the map rendering was crazy fast!
Discussions with Esri and SitePen
1. Esri gave us a one-on-one demo of Business and Community Analyst products. In case you didn’t know, both have a ton of public and Esri owned data (about 13 gigs). Sure, it’s possible to download, organize and continuously update public domain datasets to do some of the analysis already in these products, but data warehousing is only part of what Business and Community Analyst offer. You also get:
- An extensive Flex application to discover and explore all that data. Flex was a good choice here. The app has charting and reporting capabilities that would have been hard to build without a rich client like Flex.
- A complete server REST API. If you want different applications than what you’ll find out-of-the-box, this API empowers you to build them. Mobile apps, Desktop apps, Web apps, whatever.
2. We talked with the Geocoding team for at least an hour this year. Custom geocoders are probably not the most entertaining of topics, but Esri’s team could not have been nicer or more helpful with our questions.
3. Meeting Dojo co-founder Dylan Schiemann was really cool. JavaScript is tough to program, having lots of pitfalls to avoid. SitePen specializes in JavaScript best practices and pushing the envelope of what modern browsers can handle. Dylan presented Top Ways Dojo Can Improve Your Mapping App and talked with us one-on-one about JavaScript best practices on Wednesday night.
4. I think we were the first to give feedback on ArcGIS for Open Street Map version 2. The tools work pretty well for editing OSM nodes and ways as long as you enable a map topology to keep them connected. Using the tool marks your edits with created_by = ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap (2.0).
Some of our Favorite Sessions
Speed Geeking was a good idea: 10 presentations, 5 minutes each. I hope they do more of this next year.
Dave Bouwman, DTS Agile, was entertaining as always: Getting Real-Time: Node.js and Socket.io
Dylan Schiemann, SitePen, had a packed house: Top Ways Dojo Can Improve Your Mapping App
– Robert Claypool, Sr. Software Developer, GISbiz
It’s official, the time has come: Adobe announced this week that Flash Player is dead for mobile devices and the related Flex SDK is being released to the open source community.
