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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.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Surveying, ESRI UC 09 at 06:56 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0) | Bookmark and Share

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As for the timeline...so what? Does it work? Is it stable? And most importantly...who cares? If was such a burning issue, either Trimble or ESRI would have done it a decade ago when ArcPAD was young. Pure BS
#1 A. Nonni Mowzis on 2009-08-12 07:33 (Reply)
Yes I agree. It should have been done as part of ArcPAD design architecture. Perhaps ESRI was not sure that ArcPAD would take off. ArcPAD still does not have a Good MapINFO interface, Now that is a worthwhile project.
John
#1.1 John Koles (Link) on 2009-08-13 19:34 (Reply)
Not sure ArcPAD would take off? ArcPAD has been around for a looong while; this 'project' was done within the last year.

I'd expect the ArcPAD may never have a good mapINFO interface...

All that being said, ESRI doesn't really extend arcPAD because it steps into the space of their close partner Trimble. ArcPAD does enough to help an ESRI employee (or maybe a reseller) close a deal without having Trimble in the room to divert the sale into a GPS system. It's not a dead product like so many 'shell' systems have been over the years at ESRI, but it's certainly not a major focus, either. Just one of the list of sorta-kinda things they make.
#1.1.1 A. Nonni Mowzis on 2009-08-17 14:19 (Reply)
ArcPad is the same old flaky piece of junk it has been for the last decade. Why not give Cybertracker.org a try instead. It offers fexible data collection interface design without programming, and the price is right ($0). Keep your data free, in nice, open shapefiles. Who would willingly want to lock it up in a proprietary, closed format such as an ESRI "geodatabase" anyway. If you need higher location accuracy, pair your GPS receiver with a real-time beacon for differential correction on the fly instead of post-processing, which Cybertracker, unfortunately, does not yet support.
#2 alternative on 2009-08-17 23:32 (Reply)
Or buy a Trimble device which is the GPS-market equivalent of ESRI software -

Depending on your choice, Trimble does pretty much whatever you need, is compatible with virtually the entire public infrastructure for such things, is priced fairly, and works reasonably well.

There really is no reason to do anything else, unless you're really just a contrarian.
#2.1 A. Nonni Mowzis on 2009-08-18 10:57 (Reply)

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