Wednesday, August 12. 2009

The Story of an ArcPAD Extension (developed in 3 months)

This from Marc Cheeves coverage of the ESRI UC and Survey and Engineering Summit in The American Surveyor:

For years, ESRI has pleaded with software manufacturers to create a direct link from ArcPad to the ESRI geodatabase, ArcServer. To that end, he mentioned the new JAVAD GNSS ArcPad extension for handhelds. ArcPad is one of ESRI's field tools, and is used to gather GIS locations.

At the recent ESRI Developers Conference in Palm Springs, Javad Ashjaee met with Dangermond and Jones. On a napkin, they developed the workflow, and in three months, Javad's software engineers--along with an ESRI software engineer sent to Moscow from Egypt--kicked out the new extension. ESRI is very excited about this development because it means, for the first time, office people can benefit, real-time, from what is going on in the field.

Two things strike me about this story. First, if ESRI was really begging for a connection from ArcPAD to the ESRI geodatabase, would that not be a good reason to speed up development of that promised API? Second, some things do start on a napkin and with the right people can get to "market" (at least for a demo) in 3 months.