Who was at the ESRI Developer Summit? Not Java Programmers!
The ESRI celebrity bloggers made a showing, but as expected the vast majority of attendees were from governmental organizations. Forestry services, county employees, and the raft of consulting companies that support them. It's clear everyone is programming in .NET these days. Sessions like "Developing AJAX ADF applications in .NET" packed in well over three hundred people. The equivalent session for Java desktop development could easily have been held in a small kitchen.
Between sessions people were encouraged to hang out in the "Meeting Center", an amply-caffeinated room where ESRI programmers made themselves available for chatting after their talks. IBM sponsored a "Java Lounge" for like-minded Java programmers to buzz about and get excited. The one time we saw anyone there I had to take a picture -- and I swear he was reading want ads.
With Microsoft recently cancelling even the fig leaf of Java support they once maintained, what does all this mean for enterprise GIS programming? It doesn't seem good. The Java and C++ GIS options are all either firmly open source or Oracle-biased, while the .NET programmers are ESRI-bound. Open source .NET GIS projects seem to all die on the vine. And yet SQL Server still has no native spatial type. It seems as though the enterprise GIS development community remains strongly bifurcated between vendors like IBM, Postgresql (and even a bit of Oracle) who are embracing open source yet don't command big market share, and vendors like Microsoft and ESRI who seem content to overcharge for extensions to their monopolies. (And snatch up .NET GIS luminaries before they can do damage). I understand their motivation commercially, but this bifurcation stunts the larger GIS community.
Google and Yahoo are leading a revolution in public awareness of GIS, but haven't made many waves yet in the enterprise software space. That's too much of a wild-card for me to speculate on, even with a belly full of poached pears and Grand Marnier!
5 Comments:
Let me say in ESRI's defence, that they didn't 'snatch' me in the way you make it sound. I applied for the job because it would enable me to do what I like best full time.
So if you want to pick on someone, pick on me for being selfish with my career and for abandoning the opensource community :-).
Furthermore, SharpMap is not dead at all, and are now working close together with the other .NET GIS projects. It is still one of the most active projects at CodePlex, and the people who took over the project, are doing a good job on maintaining and evolving it.
Ooh and let me add that MSSQL do have a _free_ spatial datatype: www.codeplex.com/mssqlspatial
I'm glad to hear there is more activity over there. I saw that the last release of code was August of 2006 and perhaps jumped the gun too quickly. In another post I'll talk about GDAL support in ESRI 9.2, which is exciting. As many of us have observed, the bottom parts of the GIS stack are becoming commoditized (simple geometries, basic projection support, etc.). It would be nice to see ESRI leaning towards open-sourcing its support at that level of the stack, or using existing code bases. GDAL is great for rasters. (I'll save my multithread rants for another post!) But why rewrite ST_GEOMETRY when Oracle has already done so? Or persistently ignore the pleadings of the Postgresql community to use the ST_GEOMETRY stuff they've built? I'd be curious to hear more about the work ESRI is doing with projects like SharpMap. Thanks for stopping by!
MsSqlSpatial is a great extension for MSSQL 2005, and it's gaining some external support. Today, Haris Kurtagic announced the first release of an open source FDO provider for MsSqlSpatial:
http://www.sl-king.com/FdoMsSql/
This allows users of MapGuide, Autodesk Map, and any other spatial applications which utilize the FDO Open Source (LGPL) libraries to use SQL Server 2005 (all editions) as their data store.
Speaking of Java... MapGuide has pretty decent Java API support.
Jason
Cool. I am curious how the problem of spatial indexing is addressed since SQL Server doesn't contain the same rich domain index extension model that other databases (e.g. Oracle) do. We'll look into FDO libraries for our interfaces with the spatial parts of our database.
The last check-in to the SharpMap repository was March 1st, so it's far from dead.
To my knowledge ESRI is not doing anything with SharpMap or other related OpenSource projects.
MsSqlSpatial uses a very simple but effective method for indexing. In addition to the binary shape column it basically adds 4 double-columns to hold min/max envelope values.
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