ESRI Developer Summit 2007: It's not Crap Anymore

A brief dispatch from the front lines here in sunny Palm Springs: The developer summit is well run, all the events start exactly on time, it's stocked with useful, well rehearsed presentations, and the convention center staff can feed 2500 hungry developers in 45 minutes. Top marks for execution. Which was more than I could say for the ESRI 9.0/9.1 product line. Beset with silly bugs and lousy quality, I was never that excited about using it. ArcGIS 9.2 looks a whole lot better. The Web ADF is producing lots of useful web controls and is totally AJAX-enabled (in an elegant, non-gimmicky way... they get it). ArcGIS server is noticeably fast in their demos, and ESRI is now hosting huge public (albeit static) services over the Internet. Three years ago the 9.0 demos were slow and you could tell this was all fresh paint. At this point it looks like they have their act sorted out. ArcIMS only appeared on one slide, probably by accident. If you're still developing on ArcIMS, it appears the party is over. While the AJAX custom ArcIMS viewer our team developed over the last year really was the cat's pyjamas, it sounds like the ADF is now a better option. More as the conference goes on -- some excellent topics being presented this morning, though I did decide to skip the presumably-totally-full-of-useless-Gartner-crap keynote on ".NET vs Java". Sheesh.