ArcWeb Explorer (Beta) was recently made available from ESRI. ArcWeb Explorer provides access to ArcWeb Services so you can easily find locations by street address, telephone number (land line), and IP address. I spent a bit of time this week-end messing with the service and have a few comments to share.
From ESRI... ArcWeb Explorer is a Web-based map viewing application based on Macromedia Flash 8. The ArcWeb Explorer uses vector mapping technology to render maps quickly in the browser instead of having the server render them. To see for yourself you can jump to http://www2.arcwebservices.com/v2006/solutions/awx.jsp for details
See also http://redlandsarcweb.esri.com/explorer/index.jsp. Running a "sporadic" wireless connection from my laptop, I managed to connect but my speed wasn't too great.. either that or this app is a bit of a pig.. I'm not quite sure yet! At first glance the biggest turn off is the lack of panning which I've become totally accustomed to when using AJAX map servers (i.e.. think of Google, local.live, etc...). Out of habit I keep trying to pan but this forces a zoom rectangle... totally annoying!
Option menus available to users include Navigate, Find, Directions, and Map styles. The find works ok and is fast, quickly taking me to a location. Searching for Seattle, WA obviously returns a quick "hit" although if you want to locate a place like "Starbucks", Seattle, WA there's no POI DB like that at the time. The street maps look pretty nice and major features and landmarks are provided (e.g.. Greyhound bus station etc...), so far though the pan and zoom using the nav tool is pretty slow.. maybe there's simply too many users testing it.
Testing the Navigation tools... cached zoom levels obviously come up fast, however, clicking the - key to zoom out caused about a 3 second delay for me and place names seemed pretty cluttered on the display. Panning... clicking the ""W" or "E" nav option to pan resulted in about a 3 second delay in regenerating the new display... it didn't seem very transparent or seamless either as I waiting for black areas to fill in with detail. The left and right arrows didn't seem to accomplish anything for me at times so that left me a bit confused. After moving around a bit it turns out the arrows function as a "page forward" page back" option... I find this a bit confusing as they really do look like they would be meant for navigation like functionality like panning - Mouse-over tips would be really nice as an additional feature and would have clarified this a bit, however, a bit a customization can easily fix this, after all this is a beta test. For now I'm still messing around and thinking that some of the issues I've noted are likely due to the early stage of the product and the heavy traffic flow from first timers trying to test and break the app... what are you finding??
The beta version of ArcWeb Explorer works best with Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox 1.5, and Netscape 8.0.
ESRI has noted that they will be providing [in a few weeks] resources to help developers create their own mapping solutions with ArcWeb Explorer and a JavaScript API.
Please note, those of you not familiar with ArcWeb Services, the application is a commercial web service. Those interested in a free resource should look into ArcWeb Services—Public Services - a no-cost Web services mapping API that is available to Web developers wishing to access ArcWeb Services—Commercial Services functionality for personal, noncommercial, and nongovernmental development projects. This is akin to the API that Google, Yahoo!, and others have made available to developers. Keep in mind that a freely available API does not constitute an open source tool.
Some comments from Andrea Rosso's Rosso World (a fine weblog about GIS and wine!). Andrea notified his readers about the availability of the Beta and provided some useful comments:
The Explorer is really cool and here are a few of the features I like in no particular order: - Performance. All maps are rendered on the fly in Flash (SWF) format via the REST API. Notice how even at full screen the maps return almost instantaneously.
- Find. The find dialog is a one line entry field that can take addresses, place names, IPs, phone numbers, zips, etc. Pretty handy to play with. I especially like the IP geocoding feature (which is part of the SOAP API too).
- Drag and Drop - You can drag places from the Find widget to the driving directions widget to tell it what stops you want, or onto the map to pan/zoom to that place... which is really nice.
- Look and Feel. I really like the nice Flash look and feel. It allows for a much more dynamic UI.
- You can upload an Excel file with addresses or points and plot them on the map which is handy if you'd like to show several addresses or stops on the map all at once. Source: http://www.rossoworld.com/
Will we soon be seeing ESRI mashups akin to Google mashups?? What's your take? Add your comments HERE
ArcWeb Explorer (Beta) was recently made available from ESRI. ArcWeb Explorer provides access to ArcWeb Services so you can easily find locations by street address, telephone number (land line), and IP address. I spent a bit of time this week-end messing with the service and have a few comments to share.
