After seeing a post about going from ArcGIS Server to Google Maps ,via GeoJason, I decided to write up a quick blurb about going the other way…
the why…
When I came back after spending a week eating Thai & Indian food @ the 2010 ESRI Developer’s Summit, I pretty much had my mind made up. From talking with other devs and seeing what’s coming (now available in beta), it was a very easy decision. Some of the those features:
- Feature Layers/Editing
- You get a bunch of pre-defined dijits if you’re down with dojo, plus, it’s relatively easy to deconstruct them and make your own editors/templates/etc.
- Time-Aware …ness?
- Another pre-defined slider dijit that lets you alter time. This is a solid addition and will become even better when they get a decent css styling scheme. Am I the only one who thinks the dojo css is stuck in the late-90s? Strange, it being a time-slider and all..
- Querying Stand-Alone Tables
- Pretty solid enhancement if you’re ok with storing those tables in a map service.
- Network Analyst
- Since we are primarily an ESRI-shop, packing up some core Network Analyst tools to run on the client is nice. No more crazy GP models and dealing with random 500 error responses.
- Much more …
Bringing this around to the topic at hand, the main point is that the ESRI ArcGIS Server Javascript for Google Maps (and Bing Maps) will not support ANY of these enhancements at version 2.0. Pret-ty lame, Milhouse. I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion on this.
*One other point to note is that Google does not allow direct access to their tiled images. This would make it impossible (legally-speaking) to integrate Google with version 2.0. It does, however, open up Bing as a potential suitor seeing as they do allow the aforementioned access. DECISIONS TO MAKE!the bad…
So giving up Google has some bad side effects. All obvious and echoed from GeoJason, but still worth repeating:
- Base-maps that are visually pleasing and familiar to users
- Overall speed and quick updates
- I’m not sure how frequent ESRI makes updates to their cached base maps or if anyone has asked them. It’d probably be good to know.
- ESRI JavaScript = Dojo
- I started with jQuery and am now using ExtJS so my experience with Dojo is still growing, however, I normally don’t like to be stuck in one dev box.
- Community Support
- Definitely agree with GeoJason on this one. The ESRI online dev community needs to get movin’. The new forums are a good start but I’d like to see a more open style of bug reporting & enhancement requests. I know the ArcGIS Ideas site launched recently and that has serious potential but one site to handle EVERYTHING that is even remotely ArcGIS-related seems a bit overwhelming. Developers need a simple, clean UI to track bugs and “vote” on enhancements or features. I don’t see this yet from the Ideas site.
so…what?
It’s all about what works best for your setup. We are an ESRI-shop so using ArcGIS Server makes sense. We have some pretty heavy data needs and requirements so querying related tables and/or stand alone tables is a huge plus. Should an update to the Google Maps Extension come up soon, I’ll definitely take another look but for now, it’s all about 2.0.
