Day 1 Developers Road Map To ArcGIS Server 9.3 At The ESRI Developer Summit 2008

After a quick break from a pretty full on plenary session at the ESRI Developer Summit, it was onto the road map sessions. I attended the ArcGIS Server road map session.

I had mixed feelings about this session as it wasn’t really a road map but more of a showcase of what’s coming again. Some of the notes I gathered are as follows:

There will be geodatabase support for Postgres, Oracle Express and DB2 with ArcSDE 9.3.

Many new features have been added to the map caching side of things along with the ability to write Python scripts to do data updates and cache maintenance.

There is a new image service for publishing raster datasets directly. This is a great feature which means that you don’t have your rasters in an MXD. They can be published directly from the disk.

If you are wanting to test your services out head over and grab a tool called Gaia 3 which is a free viewer for Windows. This supports many formats including all the open standards. You can download this from here: http://www.thecarbonproject.com/gaia.php.

There was quite a bit of talk about the ASP.NET AJAX framework and its ability to carry out partial postbacks as opposed to callbacks. The ASP.NET AJAX framework is great, making it really easy to do a bundle of things and it’s awesome to see ESRI using this.

Security is now out of the box with ArcGIS Server 9.3. You can secure web services and web applications and what’s even better is that this is all configurable from the ArcGIS Server Manager.

I will post more in depth information about these topics as I attend the sessions.