Steve’s Little world

So there is a great article on “A List Apart” about making maps without using the G or the Y (hat tip to the map room). It does a nice job introducing some of the open source players in the market. I put a small comment in the discussion about using deCarta (caveated it with a warning that it is a blatant product pitch) and there was a response. This blog post should serve as a way for people to give feedback if they want on my comments or about getting started with deCarta services. I did not want to hijack the discussion there with a big discussion with deCarta - so it was not that I was trying to drive traffic here - I was just trying to not dilute the discussion on their original post.

Little birdies have been telling me that ArcWeb Services is no more - folded into other services and the staff dispersed. There is no more purchase options on their page - only renew. Well, Nature Valley and all you other Arcweb Service customers, I could always recommend another service that is fast, stable, and scalable. You can start for free and then move on to exactly the same API when you are ready to make some bling. Same API whether we host it or if you bring it behind the firewall; novel concept - ain’t it.  If you are interested go ahead and contact me or sales@decarta.com

If you want to meet up with me here is some of the things I will be going to in the near future:

1. The web 2.0 mapping and social network meetup in Menlo Park - This should be fun with Mapfacture, remapper, and mashed life giving presentations

2. Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum -  had a great time last year and lookin forward to going again. Love the lightning round when you get to see all the cool apps people are making but it is also nice to hear the big boys talk about where they will push the enterprise.

3.  CTIA in Vegas - I am going to Mobile Jam beforehand. I really don’t like Vegas but it will be fun to be floor for this extravaganza. I will be working the booth so stop by.

4. Web 2.0 Expo - I will be there in the Tele Atlas booth looks to be a great floor as well. Come on over for a chat. I will be showing some of the demos I put together.

Farther out I am planning on attending Where and  for sure going to be at WhereCamp, perhaps Location Intelligence and Extend08.

Have I mentioned that I love living in the Valley…

Last night I went to the WCA LBS SIG to hear about Yahoo! Fire Eagle - here is my transcript from the session. Overall the take home is that Yahoo is building a public store of your location that gives you the ability to grant permission to applications to update and query your location. In other words creating a REST API to push your location to their service - they they standardize the location as best they can - then provide a REST api to query for GeoJSON or GeoRSS for your location.

Very exciting possibilities -Yahoo has taken on the task of trying to store location information in a public way. OpenSocial is trying to build the Social Graph but not on a single server - Fire Eagle is trying to do this on a central server for people’s location. So instead of being distributed data sits on their servers.

How are they going to make money with this? Either Mor was being coy or Yahoo is being coy or they really haven’t figured it out. I can see 3 ways

1. Since you need a YahooID to use it you may then start using other Yahoo services
2. They eventually start charging people to store their location (unlikely)
3. They start accessing people’s location data in an anonymous way to aggregate location information to provide unique services - such as feedback to advertisers about how many Fire Eagle users actually ended up at the event.

Should be interesting all the way around

and now the transcript…

---

FireEagle
Excellent presenter with great presentation zen
Lots o cool things you can do when you know where people are

Problems
1. Hard to capture where people are - lots o methods and even same method are different on different platforms
35 ways to find your location talk is recommended

2. Locations are hard to interpret. How to get from cell tower to lat,long and then from that to human place names is also hard [not for us]

3. It’s hard to abstract - which hierarchical level do you aggregate to, city state…

4. Location is hard to handle - have to securely store it, have to query it,

5. Hard to manage - mostly legal issues especially when you deal with different countries and states

6. Hard to share - disses symbian C++ and cross Nokia development

Implications
first casuallity is the location based web
Second - location-enhanced social networks. Claims loopt suffers from platform issues but he doesn’t understand loopt - commiunication is neighborhood dependent
FireEagle should increase the number of ppl in the network

The Big Idea  - share your location online
Store and make sense of your location
Share the location with apps and services
While  maintaining control over data and privacy

Available soon but no time table

Fire Eagle sets up a service that acts to create a many to many between location capture and location services. Fire eagle is about managing permissions and also does a cross walk between input location to a standardized hierarchy

??So how does yahoo make money

3 step into the API
Authentication
Update
Query - there are different levels of accuracy that users can allow from exact to country

Uses OAuth for authentication
The application never knows the YahooID of the user
To update you send the REST request with the key and the location and get an ok response
To query you send the key and you get the user location at the proper level authorized for your app by the user

??How do I identify which user I want info for if I don’t know the ID

Using either GeoRSS or GeoJSON as the response to the query

??But an app is either allowed or not allowed but not on a user by user basis

They made a big deal about your own data and privacy

??Does Hide Me throw away the data coming in or just not show it in a query

This post is going to talk about using Frameworks (JSF, ASP.NET, Django, Ruby on Rails…) to build web applications and perhaps they have outlived their usefulness in many situations.
I have started to put together a demo server here at deCarta and as part of that I am going to need to write some demos. I know that when I write some MS based demos I will be using ASP.NET since that is was one of the benefits/drawback of MS development - one “blessed” web framework.

It has been a while since I have written some Java web applications and so I thought I would peruse the landscape. I have worked in JSF before but the XML hell that is the configuration files really harshes my mellow. That being said Seam seems to be an interesting framework but there is certainly a steep learning curve and I am still unclear if it runs on Tomcat. I then find Wicket which has no XML config files and everything is done through Java code - which appeals to me. I use an IDE so it can help me avoid doing the mundane and repetitive tasks which are prone to error. Most IDEs have no way to confirm that you don’t have typos in your XML or your XML declares a non-existent class. So Wicket, using nothing but Java code, feels like a step forward… until I look at the amount of code and classes needed just to do a simple form. Feeling undeterred I try to get going and then realize that Wicket documents relies heavily on Maven, and while I have nothing inherently against Maven it is yet another thing I have to learn that I am not in the mood to do now.

Now feeling a bit frustrated I go speak to Geoff and Brent, our web services and JavaScript gurus respectively, to seek words of advice. Turns out they have used Wicket and a bunch of other frameworks and they say, as somewhat devil’s advocates, that frameworks are a waste of time. They now believe that most web apps should be written as Servlets or web services which feed appropriate data to your JavaScript library of choice. I push back a bit and they do concede that for large team projects or repeatable projects a framework makes sense but they also point out that that you spend an inordinate amount of time wrestling with the framework rather than writing code.

And this is the question for the day - has the evolution of web development moved us away from frameworks as the one true way for web developers. All the web languages out there now have their own frameworks, from perl to Ruby to .NET to Java, are they overkill for most projects. Is there where REST and Ajax (and Comet soon enough) have brought us?

When I discovered Struts it was like a ray of light cutting through all the one-off web code I had written. But are we now at a point where the frameworks and the support infrastructure are just too much hassle without enough payoff. I understand sessions are another tricky thing that frameworks help handle but perhaps that is all the frameworks should do. Programming servlets to accept GETs or PUTs and having them spit out XML or JSON is really an order magnitude (WAG ) easier than taking on a framework. It seems some in the Java community are also discussing this issue (look in the middle of the Seam discussion for the grey box which is Matt’s commentary ).

So lazy web what do you think - has the time come to give up on these heavy frameworks and move to something more lightweight - REST services with an AJAX library fronting it? Or is this just a lazy person trying to get out of doing the hard work climbing a learning curve.

For those in the geo community this would like moving from an ESRI ADF or MapGuide to something like OpenLayers + GeoServer’s KML API.

I would really love to get some more data points from the community…

I am going to return to blogging back here for a while. Taunts of Fake James aside, I am not happy with our current blogging solution on the devZone and will be moving back to here until we get it sorted out. Please see my post on the devZone for a bit more explanation.

oh the shame

Way back way in the dark ages (fall last year) I gave a short talk at AjaxWorld as part of the TeleAtlas sponsored session. In doing a search today I came across the video link. Lecole Cole (formerly of TA) gives the introduction and then is my bit. Stay tuned after my talk to see MapQuest give a nice demo of their tech and terrabitz show off their extremely cool spatial application. Thanks goes to Brent and Peter for technical discussions, to Matt, John, Lecole, and Penny Duan (TA) for helping with the content, and to TA for inviting us on stage and giving us some pretty darn cool data to play with!

As always words of jest and derision are kindly appreciated.

http://www2.sys-con.com/webinararchive.cfm?pid=wc_aw7w_d2_s10_t1_teleatlas&registered=on

Hey all - hope you had a happy and safe new year celebration. The devZone @ deCarta will start hosting deCarta employees and team blogs in a few days. Given our current portal architecture at the devZone I can not aggregate the content from this blog so I will switch most of my copious [cough cough] blogging activity over to the devZone. Expect an announcement here as soon as it goes live.

They make buy sell reccomendations to institutional and mutual fund types.
Jeff Rath lays it down…

Key stats and points:

12 Billion in cap will be available after this round of consolidation

There is a collision coming between PNDs and Handsets

Huge companies are understanding that location in their current apps let them get better profits: Hexagon, Pitney Bowes, John Deere…

Nokia is no longer a device company

Really interesting talk - wish you were here…

I am having a great time at our devCon- just finished an interesting panel with Maps.com, NIM, loopt, Proxix, and Local Matters. Fun place to be as a platform - you get to see all these people building kick ass products off your stuff. Everything from mobile apps using DDS or Insurance companies writing custom DDS plugins or Customers writing their own javascript to roll awesome apps.

The other great fun has been all the interaction I have seen. Watching someone ask a question and then watch 5 people come up to that person to talk about why they were asking and what they are doing.

I have started uploading some of my photos to flickr and tagging them as devCon07

And Adena is doing a great job blogging the sessions she is attending. Thanks Adena, hope you enjoy your sessions and yeah the wireless here has been great - not one dropped connection yet.