Steve’s Little world

All I can say is Holy SHIT!

Google Gears API Developer’s Guide - Home

This post is to help remember my uncle Aaron Lieb Rosenstreich (of blessed memory), 187th Airborne, killed in Vietnam on May 11th, 1969. A gifted craftsman, artist, and Peace Corp volunteer - beloved friend, brother, son, and uncle. Links 1 and 2

I am going to be at WhereCamp so if you want to get together to talk/hack/eat/drink/be merry ping me at my scitronpousty $ gmail , com.

For all you ArcSDE users out there - a good reason to SP2 for 9.2 users and users of older versions should see the notes at the end…

SecuriTeam™ - ESRI ArcSDE Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

Following up on James’s post about my IM ping - it is a good time to be a Java developer if you deal with spatial problems (for other problems as well but I am just going to talk about spatial today.

There is the ESRI Stack. So if you want to go down that route with the full support and need to use ESRI technologies you are good to go.

Here is the stack that is available to you today for free (as in beer and speech) with some brief personal experiences tacked on…

IMS server: geoserver - super easy to set up, performs well, does WFS, WMS, and KML, and reads a bunch of formats

OpenLayers: not specifically Java but works perfectly fine with it and some of their demos hit against geoserver.

Datastore: PostGIS with PostgreSQL - not much experience using but a large user community, a plugin to use with ArcGIS (oh if I didn’t have billable goals), an interface to geoserver, uDig, and geotools, and a JDBC driver that can talk spatial talk

Desktop : uDig, Jump, OpenJump, and a couple more that I can’t keep track of. They are not at the level of ArcGIS but they can do quite a bit of stuff and are open so you can extend the code however you like.

Virtual Globe: WorldWind Java - easy cheezy to get running, runs really fast, and in very active development with a friendly user community.

Toolkit: Geotools and OpenMap- spatial toolkits that have been around for at least 6 to 7 years maybe longer.

IDEs: Eclipse and Netbeans - both excellent IDEs with large user communities and active corporate support.

So there you have it, a huge stack of Java spatial applications and libraries - running on all the major OS’s - running server side and desktop side.

Do you know what your cost as a consultant or developer is to entry into this space? $0 in actual startup costs. Buy yourself a laptop, leech off your neighbors wifi connection (not that I would condone such behavior), and dig in.

Java is taught in most of the CS and IS programmings as the programming language of choice so it is also easish to find developers or learn yourself. You would be in good company with firms such as Fedex, NASA, and Motorola to name a few.

Open source and proprietary solutions all with the same language. I just think it is an interesting proposition to those who want to start developing and building spatial solutions.

VIRTUAL EARTH SERVICE API TERMS OF USE

So there they are, and they are very clear  (kudos for MS on that).  But I think they are actually more restrictive for people like me in the consulting business in particular look at item #3.

You are not permitted to use the API or the Service on any intranet or non-public website, unless You have a MWS/VE Agreement that includes such rights.

Does this mean if I want to use VE imagery with CNDDB records on top for my biologists internally I am in violation of their TOS?

What about this doozy in 5.10

You may not, nor may You authorize others to: i) copy, save, download, distribute, transmit or in any way manipulate the photographic imagery and the 3D models in the Service;…

Does that mean I can not take a screen shot of VE imagery and put it in a report to a client? Forget to a client, what about in a screenshot to coworker. Certainly seems that way to me.

If my concerns are correct (which is a big if), then VE just got a whole lot less useful for the kinds of things I, and my company, need to do. I understand the MS will probably never come to my door and say - hey you took a screen shot of that wetland deliniation and included it in your field manual - but my company prefers to be on the right side of the rules.

tecosystems » Too Rich For My Taste: The RIA Q&A

With all the discussion of Silverlight, Apollo, and JavaFX I think this is a pretty great read about the danger before us. Much pain and suffering this way lies…

It is here… So I think the opened the door a bit too soon, since the streaming of tiles is painful. But once you get some tiles it is really fast in their demo app. Much faster than GE. (big picture here)

And the labels always face you even when you rotate the earth (big picture here):

So fun to play with though they definetly need to work on getting the data out there faster. It responds nicely to movement and now I want to see if it can read KML. If so then this plus geoserver make me a very happy man….

Maybe more to follow…