ArcGIS 9.3 Services Explorer

Continuing on from my post this morning about the ArcGIS 9.3 JavaScript, REST API’s where ESRI released an example showcasing the JavaScript API, I decided to dig a little further and have a look at the service descriptions.

Basically if you browse to: http://sampleserver1.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services or http://sampleserver2.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services you can see these service descriptions.

I like that fact that ESRI has now created a ArcGIS Services Explorer where you can view all the services running on your server. In the example above they have a number of folders setup on the servers to categorise things. In ArcGIS Server 9.2, you basically get the WSDL generated which is not really meaningful until you start querying the services.

The UI is great but it is custom and specific to ESRI based web services only. The UI’s look like they are partially generated and then customised for specific operations.

Looking at a cached map service: http://sampleserver1.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services…, I like the amount of information being fed back. It shows us straight away that it is a single fused map cache and information about the tiles, also the ability to view the map service in a number of viewers. This is awesome!

This is going to be very powerful for third party developers out there. The ability to have all this information on hand when you don’t know much about the map service or any other sort of service is a major bonus. Being able to execute certain operations against the web service is another big one. This is pretty standard for web services but we haven’t seen it from the ESRI ones so far.

For the developers out there I think this is going to save a considerable amount of time when using these API’s.