Jun

6

Spatial Database for Postgres and ArcGis users: how to choose

Filed on June 6th, 2008 at 5:45 pm under , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments 

As many of you can have already read, ArcSde for Postgres is coming out at ArcGis 9.3 (it is currently in the release candidate state). It will let you store geometries in two formats, Esri geometry and PostGis geometry, in the same fashion ArcSde for Oracle is letting Esri or Oracle geometries be stored.
I have seen some interest in the GIS community about this new, and i was reading interesting posts by Bill Dollins, Paul Ramsey, James Fee and Dave Bouwman, so I thought i would post here my opinion. Plus, as some of you may already know, zigGis 2.0 is out, so I am very interested in understanding where it would be better to use one (ArcSde) or the other (zigGis 2.0) solution.

First let me introduce you my point of view: i am since the ARC/INFO era a great fan of Esri software, and I am one of the many users in the GIS community saying that Esri is much much better vs Open Source in the GIS desktop products sector.
In fact, while also in the GIS OS scenario there are good products like QGIS, uDig, gvSIG (and some other), in my opinion no one of them still can even fairly reach what ArcGis Desktop and its extensions can actually do (with the big limit that you can use it only in a Microsoft box, but that is another story).
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Oct

27

MapFlashViewer Framework: ASP .NET Implementation (C#)

Filed on October 27th, 2006 at 8:50 pm under , , , , | 1 Comment 

It is very easy to get started with the MapFlashViewer Framework in the ASP .NET Implementation (C#) I talked about in this post.

This implementation was written using ActiveX Connector for ArcIMS 9.0 and C# MapScript for MapServer 4.10.0. You can easily adapt the code for previous or next versions.

Open the solution

You will find several files in the C# ASP .NET project included with the solution you downloaded:

  • A simple default.aspx web form with the MapControl user control over it
  • A form test.aspx for debugging purpose (you don’t need unleass you are in troubles)
  • the Controller (responsable for translating XML request/response to the Flash UI): the xml.aspx page
  • the FlashViewer.ImageMapServer namespace with the classes needed for the .NET implementation (particullary impourtant are MapServerFactory.cs, MapServer.cs and ArcIMS.cs)
  • the MapControl user control

You should easily follow how it works the implementation, for simplicity you can take a look at the UML Class Diagram (that should be the same for each environment implementation):

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Oct

26

MapFlashViewer Framework

Filed on October 26th, 2006 at 4:23 pm under , , , , | 13 Comments 

MapFlashViewer Framework is a simple Flash viewer for several (even any, if someone intends to write an implementation) internet map server (at the moment I wrote an implementation for Esri ArcIMS and MapServer).

You can view a working demo of MapFlashViewer for Esri ArcIMS here and the same working demo (with same data) for MapServer here.

Why using Flash?

It has always been a pain writing web user interface for web mapping. The most common approach is to write javascript client code to perform the main GIS actions (zooming, panning, etc etc).
There is also some example of java applet GIS web interface, but the problems with applet are performances, generally very slow.
IMHO the best way to write Rich UI for the web, like a GIS web interface is, is by using Flash: quick, rich OO programming environment (ActionScript), compatible for every browser (not like javascript) and a couple of other reasons.

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