Tuesday, March 18, 2008
ArcGIS Server Javascript API & Dojo Framework
Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 8:32:20 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: Ajax | ArcGIS Server | Dojo

Based on the Super Tuesday sample site, we got a preview of what ESRI is planning in 9.3.

Map Widgit

Based on Dojox, ESRI has created some wijits (are they dijits if they are based on dojox?) of their own, which we can see in the dojo.require statements...

 dojo.require("esri.map");
 dojo.require("esri.tasks.query");

I'd assume there are more packages lurking around, but this is what I found in a quick look around.

I also noticed something interesting in the constructor for the map - usePlainJson - could this indicate that they have a compressed/encoded Json format? That would be really good, as you can get a lot of bloat when you start shipping around un-compressed JSON geometries. Google uses an encoding scheme, which John O'Brien has written up in an article, and implemented for Virtual Earth so that may also be in the mix.

You can see the javascript for these components here: (it's minified, so it's not exactly readable, but is publicly available) http://serverapi.arcgisonline.com/jsapi/arcgis/?v=1

 

Vectors in the Browser: Dojox.gfx

Dojox is the next generation of Dojo dijits which are pushing the edge of what's possible. The Dojox.gfx package provides an abstraction layer for dealing with vector geometries in the browser - it renders SVG or VML depending on the browser.

I'm glad that we chose to start working with Dojo, as it looks like it will come in handy really soon ;-)

 

In my opinion, the REST services and the Javascript API are "the" 9.3 features, and I'll be focusing most of my attention on this over the next few days.

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