Tuesday, July 19, 2005
ESRI ArcIMS HTML View Survey
Posted on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 2:02:17 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: ArcIMS
Ryan Olson has posted about ESRI releasing a survey for users of the ArcIMS HTML client.
While I have not used this much in the past, I do have some ideas for the future, Ryan does note that this is a chance to influence a re-design of the HTML client. And I do have some ideas for that...

First off, lets all agree that the current HTML client is a javascript nightmare. No slight to the folks who wrote it, or people who've made it do some very cool things, but really, it needs some serious updating.
So, here are my suggestions for the new version...

  1. This should be obvious - use AJAX. Google has set the bar for interaction, and now we all have to go there. ESRI included.
  2. Use Javascript objects. This is one of the nicest things about the Google Maps API - happy little objects all over the place. It also makes it easy to fold into other apps - which is one of the biggest issues with the current ArcIMS HTML client.
  3. Use javascript "tool classes" to add functionality to the system. Brian Flood has a breif example on his post about extending Google Maps
  4. This may be reaching, but if ESRI could integrate an option for a "tiling" service which could leverage the CivicMaps open source Google-like panning/zooming. The page at civicactions.net describes how to do this with MapServer, so maybe ESRI should look at this too (or leave something on the table for us consultants to build :-) )
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