GIS in Practice

These early days of winter I find myself coding in Java, HTML, dabling in VBA6/.NET, ESRI ArcObjects, along with my usual interations of ArcSDE implementation and Oracle DBMS hackery. I have become the webmaster for a few outfits, so I'm having fun toying with DreamWeaver's and WordPress capabilities. Previously being quite the HTML brute, there are a couple welcome editing and development utilities. My off-the-cuff nature concerning web development and programming was mostly due to the inordinate amount of time I would spend on setting up and tweaking my webservers. Upon being moved cross-country to New Mexico, however, my once infallible Linux machine suffers a hard-drive failure. I went to boot it up a few weeks ago to the morbid sounds of hard-disk access knocks. Nevertheless, this gave me time to jet my HTML up on a less-tinkering setup, and thus I've spent more of my hours and days coding HTML and working on PHP and CGI issues.

The bloody bulk of my 40+ hour workweeks are finding me in front of Netbeans, J-Creator and Eclipse's IDE. I am piecing together, bit-by-bit (quite literally), the elements of an XML form reader for a Fortran project in another group at the Lab. All told, I am truly impressed with the refined nature of Netbeans and the ease of quickly editing within J-Creator. I am less enthralled with Eclipse, though I do like to stand behind it's cross-platform integration, and arguably very capable Visual Editor 1.1. This made construing an array of panes, textfields, scrollpanes, tabs and labels for such in minimal time. Netbeans also offers a visual editor in the IDE, though I have enjoyed less time actually programming in it, unfortunately. I look to start doing so to cross-compare in the very near term.

At that, some texts that have become companion manuals have been the Netbeans IDE Field Guide, and Eclipse: Building Commercial Quality Plug-ins. These manuals have proved indispensibile in getting me off the ground and headlong into the most state-of-the-art Java IDEs on the market. One of the biggest niceties: the IDEs are freeware! This sets them far apart from MS Visual Basic 6 and .NET environments where you need to sink a few hundred dollars into their development platforms. Although, there are some potential vyings from the MS camp that have developed around the .NET 2005 infrastructure. Scouring my RSS feeds in My Yahoo led me to a Slashdot article concerning the new "Express Edition" of Visual Basic. I of course dug a little deeper to see what's happening in the Visual C++ Express Edition realm as well. All told, there are some truly impressive prospects coming down the pipeline. Hopefully those bottomless coffers at Microsoft will produce something for the open-source community to emulate and enhance yet again (tounge-in-cheek, but such are most SourceForge projects related to desktop development at least).

Where's the GIS?!

Oh yeah, I'm a GIS Specialist! Though I haven't necessarily felt like one most days lately, I have been doing some things within the GIS universe. Actually, it's been a great stride down memory lane as I have had the chance to do some hard coding in ESRI Avenue for a legacy ArcView 3.x application. I had to re-meld my brain to the ways of GetThemes, ActiveDocs and .AsGrid scripting nuance, but it has been a godsend. Gratiutous code snippet:

lstGThemes = {}
For each theTheme in theView.GetThemes
If (theTheme.Is(GTheme)) then
lstGThemes.Add(theTheme)
End

If (lstGThemes = Nil) Then
MsgBox.Info("No GRIDs", sTitle)
End
End

Oh to code with the simple and straight-forward syntax of Avenue again! True, it's a more limited environment if you're talking about buzzworthy contexts of enterprise GIS (EGIS), internet map serving, and IDEs as aforementioned, but what a dream to write a few tens-of-lines of code within a few minutes and actually getting results! I did have to scour the Arcscripts pages some, and rifle through my own script archives circa 1997-1999. But, all told, the product has been a blast, and delivered at 50% completion well within budgeted time and financial constraints. Sounds like I'm waxing mystical about some new ESRI application, doesn't it?!

Outro

Future updates to these newest webpages of mine will most assuredly contain more GIS content, especially in the realms of:

• Enterprise GIS; open-source and proprietary software and installation platforms
• GIS programming using IDEs, Microsoft Visio, dovetailed text editors for ArcGIS 10x, and Python solutions for ArcGIS 10x
• The ESRI ArcGIS 10x Beta program
• Potentially some information on Linux cluster processing for fine-grained cellular data and GIS

Happy trails to you!