My friend Diego Guidi is the smartest GIS/.NET developer I personally know here in Italy. He is the developer of NetTopologySuite, the port in the .NET world of the popular Java's JTS Topology Suite from VIVID Solutions. I wanted, sooner or later, write some stuff here about WMS and TMS, and now I am very happy that Diego asked me to publish this brilliant article about this topic.

First of all, let me thanks Paolo for hosting this post! I hope that this article can be interesting and useful like other stuff that you can find here

Introduction

There are a lot of discussions out there about how to define Google Earth, Google Maps, and related apps… are they GIS? Viewers? Video games? Even a neologism was created: Neogeography. I think that all the folks out there have the same idea in mind: maybe Google don't make the same business as ESRI, but Google Earth is cool, and it's funny to play with it!

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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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