The Plenary Session At The ESRI Developer Summit 2010

Well its been a busy morning as the ESRI Developer Summit 2010 kicked into full swing. The ESRI Developer Summit 2010 kicked off yesterday morning with a number of pre-summit seminars. Information around this can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/events/… This morning though was all about the Plenary Session and showcasing the developer message to attendees.

Once again the social media pipe’s were going crazy with almost real-time information flooding over Twitter. Many individuals were posting about what was being talked about and shown at the Plenary Session. My summary of this is as follows.

 

It was an early morning for those presenting with things being tested behind the scenes.

Jack Dangermond is backstage wishing good luck and encouragement to all the plenary presenters this morning.

This years ESRI Developer Summit 2010 attracted over 1200 developers from over 60 countries all around the world.

 

The Plenary Session kicked off with Jack Dangermond welcoming developers to the ESRI Developer Summit 2010 and thanking them for attending. Jack announced the upcoming release of ArcGIS 10 to developers talking about how powerful and mind blowing the experience is going to be.

This is followed by Jim McKinney who talked about the ESRI Developer Summit, what it was to where it’s come. Jim also announced that the date of ArcGIS 10 Prerelease.

ArcGIS 10 Prerelease will be made available for download on April 1st 2010.

Scott Moorehouse was up next to talk about ESRI’s strategy moving forward. Talking about how ArcGIS is shifting from client server to web centric architecture.

Maps will be the metaphor of good geo system design. Simple, specific and collaborative.

As we saw and heard from the ESRI Business Partner Conference 2010, the cloud is getting much more attention from ESRI. As an additional core focus from ArcGIS 10 are mobile lightweight API’s. The iPhone being one example of this.

Scott moved onto to talking about arcgis.com and what’s coming in this area. We lots about this in at the BPC. arcgis.com will have community-editable maps and will be the new online place for maps, applications, people and community services and resources. This will be released as part of ArcGIS 10.

Jeremy moved on to demonstrate the new arcgis.com and some of the capabilities that will be coming. Someone shared a as a very interesting comment as well.

arcgis.com looks a lot like an SDI only better, discover services, make your map, save, share secure or public. Nice!

It’s great that ESRI is pushing the concept of an SDI. arcgis.com would be one example of this as we get users out there to adopt this approach and begin sharing their data.

It was next onto demonstrating ArcGIS Explorer Online. This was demonstrated at the BPC as well and as we saw this is built in Silverlight. A really neat web application providing desktop like functionality in a web environment. This can be launched from an arcgis.com search result allowing users to quickly see the results in viewer. This also have a full screen mode as Silverlight supports this.

arcgis.com and ArcGIS Explorer are free to air reducing your total cost of ownership.

Sud moved on to talk about ArcGIS Server and the enhancements coming. Amazon Web Services images prebuilt with ArcGIS Server will be available. ArcGIS Server 10 will also offer an extensibility model for REST and SOAP services allowing you to add your own functionality.

The ArcGIS API for JavaScript 2.0 was demonstrated. The prerelease was made available yesterday with information on this here: http://geo.geek.nz/events/… The new editing capability was demonstrated as well as time-aware layers. This was also demonstrated at the ESRI International User Conference 2009. The new web editing capabilities tie in nicely with Jack’s concepts around VGI. This really opens up applications to users allowing them to contribute information.

Other features of ArcGIS Server 10 demonstrated included the support for attachments, being able to edit stand-alone tables and imagery with the new mosaic datasets.

There is going to be a new ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF template gallery coming. This will be very helpful to developers who are not designers!

The new Flex Viewer was demonstrated showing how easy it will be to customise the look and feel.

It replaces the previous viewer and is fully support with a much nicer UI.

I am thinking of this as a replacement of for the .NET ADF OOTB viewer that ships with ArcGIS Server. I think with this OOTB viewer those users that want something simple will have a great option.

It was then onto a quick break as attendees refreshed themselves and raiding the geobadges.

Jim Barry started up the next part of the Plenary Session talking about some of the enhancements coming to the resource centres. If you are on the beta program for ArcGIS 10 you would have seen these changes already.

ESRI are using a Google Appliance good SEO to index the resource centers! This will mean better results coming soon from arcgis.com

This is excellent! SEO has been lacking so it’s a major step forward.  There will also be new forums coming as per the resource centre update.

It was then onto the mobile demonstrations. Demonstrations included the out of the box tablet applications which has some good extensibility options built in.

The iPhone SDK and application which is coming soon was demonstrated. The iPhone application will have the ability to search maps on arcgis.com as well as reverse geocoding. The iPhone SDK supports on-board GPS and camera for submission of data to a geodatabase as well!

The iPhone application is coming first, but iPad, Windows Phone 7 and Android are in the plans for ArcGIS Mobile

These would be the current generation of smart phones and devices and ESRI will be supporting them as soon as they can. It’s good to know that work in currently underway.

After the mobile demonstrations attracted lots of the attention it was onto desktop and demonstrating some of the new enhancements.

John Calkins went through an interactive demonstration exploring desktop and emphasising efficiency before Euan Cameron talked about some of the new additions from a developer perspective coming in ArcGIS 10. Some of the new enhancements include:

• Python window console within ArcMap
• Embedded ArcCatalog window in ArcMap
• Search window to locate/add spatial datasets without having to use the add data button
• No UI locking when using geoprocessing tools as these run in the background
• Sharing of specific layer packages on arcgis.com
• Integration with arcgis.com enhancing content and sharing capabilities
• Being able to automate everything with Python

• Desktop add-ins which allow developers to quickly create add-ins, drop them into a folder and away you go.
• ArcPy has intellisense built in to make it easier for developers and those scripting.
• Map production can now be automated with Python
• Being able to share add-ins with other users on arcgis.com

Coarse-grained arcpy tools are way simpler than ArcObjects

This was an interesting quote that I picked up on! The big push is certainly ArcPy and getting developers to adopt this. Why would you still be programming in ArcObjects? Well I think there will be select cases!

There will also be concurrent use ArcGIS Engine runtime licensing coming with ArcGIS 10. For the question that always gets asked.

A 64-bit version of ArcGIS Server is being worked on and this is currently a development project.

And so this ended a pretty awesome Plenary Session which was packed with loads of great demonstrations really focused towards to the developer community. There was loads of great comments from developers on the social side of things and I it’s great to see that we are moving in the right direction.

ArcGIS 10 will be a very exciting release whether you are a developer or an end-user and I think the ESRI Developer Summit 2010 has really shown this.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter for sharing information in real-time. Hopefully this summary has helped. The information coming through has been amazing. The afternoon and next few days move into more focused sessions. I will try and post a some collated information as these days move along.