Archives for March 10, 2006

Some masher updates of interest… Philip over at batchgeocoder (http://batchgeocode.blogspot.com/) has penned some comments that compare the google maps API vs Yahoo! maps API vs Mapquest API. It’s an interesting read and starts to touch on some of the issues that many developers likely have in the back of their minds… you need to be aware of the licensing, be aware of the restrictions and limitations, and be aware that your application may rely entirely on someone else’s technology… this could be particularly troubling, particularly those that depend on their mashups for revenue – this actually brings up a good question – are people making $$ off their mashups and if so, how lucrative have they been? I always tends to fall back on all the old sayings, like… let the buyer beware, and you get what you pay for! I’m not bashing the companies that are providing the tools.. after all, they’ve been upfront. More on the topic of “fragile mashups” have been provided in a recent post by Brian Flood (developer of Arc2earth) – I suggest you give it a read at http://www.spatialdatalogic.com/cs/blogs/brian_flood/archive/2006/03/07/244.aspx – see also this article at Zdnet titled “mashups: who’s really in control?” (http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=128) – the article is a good read and discusses exactly what you may have thought on many occasions… mashups relay on someone else’s data and business model.. a scary situation that leaves developers vulnerable. The article uses Craig’s list as an example.. recall Craig’s list pulled the plug on the scrapping of it’s data by a commerical mashup at http://www.oodle.com/ which was making loads of $$ using Craig’s data but costing craig’s list precious bandwidth… on the flip-side, a free, one-man show at http://www.housingmaps.com/ got craig’s blessing to scrape their data.

Well, the first ESRI developer summit is only days away. Thanks to Clint Brown of ESRI for taking some time to jot down a few comments to some questions I threw at him regarding the summit. He tells us that the crew in Redlands is quite excited that more than 1,000 developers are already planning on attending the summit (nice number for event #1). What excites Clint and crew? Quite simple… “meeting and talking to some of our developer users”. Brown also mentions that the peer-to-peer sharing that will transpire between developers should be brisk and will make this event a winner. On the menu for the week-end… two days of ESRI’s own developers and product engineers working with the conference attendees to help them solve their developer problems using ArcGIS and EDN. They will show a bit of what is coming in the 9.2 release, but will focus primarily on helping developers get their jobs done. Another key topic to be addressed includes trying articulate and communicate a framework for what a “GIS developer does” and how a developer should leverage geodatabases, maps, geoprocessing, globes, and so forth in building their application solutions – aka. creating an understanding of what GIS adds to a computing platform. Thanks again to Clint for the feedback. The Dev Summit takes place March 17-18 in Palm Springs, CA – see www.esri.com/devsummit. PS… if Clint brings along his guitar I have no doubt the discussions will continue late into the evening if him and the gang are jamming around the pool!