Slashgeo

Remember the previous entry on REST and GIS? Could RESTful webmapping become OGC standards? The cfis and import cartography blogs discuss new REST interest at the Open Geospatial Consortium. Here's the second post and the third. From the third post: "Everything that's wrong the the WxS Suite (that's a fancy acronym for Web Map Server, Web Feature Server, Web Context Server, etc.) boils down to one thing - they are based on the fundamentaly flawed concept of service endpoints. A service endpoint is a program sitting on the network that defines its own API."

Geoblogs have been regularly covering REST technology and geospatial applications lately, see the related stories below. Directions Mag offers an informative article named Emerging Technology: Geospatial Web Services and REST which reduces the confusion with REST, SOAP, GET and POST. From the article's introduction: "However, when considering the evolution of geospatial Web services, it turns out that explaining REST and clarifying the discussion suggests the need for a proposal of how to apply REST to geospatial Web services. Such a proposal might help the open source and open standards communities establish better techniques to make geospatial Web services more open and accessible." Meanwhile, you have import cartography explaining how KML could be published in a RESTful manner, and the same blog also suggests serious (?) corrections to the DM article.

Anonymous Voxel writes "From rajsingh.org blog: REST has been a hot topic this year in the geo world. There’s a discussion group, a geographic data server, many blog posts, and email discussions. I’ve been mulling over what this means to OGC over the last couple months, reading RESTful Web Services, and discussing with the various advocates around the community. After all this, I think I know what’s going on, but I don’t think there’s any one clear explanation (despite some nice pieces of the puzzle here and here) available, and there has certainly been little effort to analyze the REST architecture in relation to geographic information systems theory, so that’s what I’ll try to do now." See related stories below.

Despite regular REST coverage this summer (see related stories below), 48% of the 60 answers clearly show how REST is not understood by most geospatial professionals. Of the other half, 26% claim RESTful approaches will prevail, and 16% are waiting for the Open Geospatial Consortium to join the bandwagon. 8% say they don't need REST themselves and no one said REST will have no impact, probably meaning REST is really important. Our new poll ask you about your feelings on the extent of geospatial technology presence on the web. Unrelated, I'll now try to catch up the 1000+ geonews item I missed in the last two weeks due to my accident, expect more stories.

Via Spatially Adjusted, I learned the BatchGeocode.com free tool now supports European countries: "Yahoo Maps Added Recently added support for geocoding in Europe. Now you can geocode and get map coordinates for these countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy. [other countries have limited support, see the blog entry]" See the previous story on BatchGeocode.com and other related stories below.

Several geoblogs shared their thoughts on Dirk Gorter hired by ESRI and his intentions to use Agile development. Here's the wikipedia article on Agile software development: "Agile software development is a conceptual framework for software engineering that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project." From GeoScrum: "Both Dave Bouwman and I have written posts asking when the GIS community will start realizing the benefits of agile practices.  I believe that with ESRI taking such a definitive stance in favor of implementing agile practices, that this could be the impetus the GIS world has been waiting for.  If the market leader in GIS software is going agile, hopefully the rest of the GIS market will follow their lead."

Chris Spagnuolo writes "I've published the results of the 2008 Agile GIS Survey on my GeoScrum blog. You can also download the full whitepaper and a summary of the results at www.chrisspagnuolo.com. An article on the survey results is also available on Directions Magazine.


I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their promotion of the Agile GIS Survey: James Fee of Spatially Adjusted and Planet Geospatial , Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine , Hilary Perkins of URISA and DTS, Glenn Letham of The AnyGeo Blog, Ron Exler of the GeoFactor, and Agile Commons. I would also like thank Ryan Martens of Rally Software Development for independently reviewing and commenting on the results of this study." The survey was introduced here in early February.

There has been a lot of news this week about the recent events at the ESRI developer summit. I have composed those into one story for your reading pleasure.

Summit Reflections - Another overview of the summit
Security In ArcGIS - Discusses the changed security model.
Mobile SDK - Programming And Design Patterns For The ArcGIS Mobile SDK
API Discussion - Discusses REST, Javascript, map-cache and Geodatabase.
FLEX API - Discusses the FLEX API
ArcWeb Services - Talks about discontinued ArcWeb Services
Using REST API - Discusses using the REST API
ArcGIS Server Code Challenge Winner - See the $15G winner
Fortran API - Discusses lack of Fortran API.