The GIS Explosion

It's Thanksgiving, which for most tends to be a time for reflection (among other traditional emotions); I'm no exception and was thinking about how the GIS industry has changed in the 11+ years that I've been in the business.

In the late 1990s, I worked in local government in small ESRI-centric GIS offices. At that time, if you were pretty proficient with Arc/Info (command line) and ArcView 3x, you pretty much were a GIS expert. My, how things have changed...

Once ArcGIS 8.3 came out, everything began to change. The programming backbone moved away from aml scripting and avenue to more "open source" environments like Visual Basic etc. Then, at 9.2, ArcGIS Server apparently became the focus of most ESRI marketing and the user community delved in.

Now, at 9.3, ArcGIS Server can be programmed using numerous APIs, ArcGIS Clients are programmed using ArcObjects along with VBA, several .NET languages, geoprocessing is commonly coded using Python, and it goes on and on...

As a database / GIS designer and implementer, I commonly need a suite of tools to "stitch" apps and workflows together. While fairly proficient with ArcObjects, I'm certainly no guru but can figure out most simple tools for saving time editing in ArcGIS. Along with continuing to learn more tricks and techniques with ArcObjects, I'm now turning my focus to Python.

Python seems to be a powerful scripting language that you can utilize for many system tasks as well as wiring up geoprocessing tasks etc. Along with ArcObjects and .NET, I can do most of what I need to with that toolset, at least on the client side...

It will be interesting to see what the future will bring in terms of the backbone of GIS. No matter what, it will probably move toward Open Source solutions (like Python)...

First blog...

This is the first post to my new blog...I've created this as a forum for my thoughts and experiences as a GIS consultant. I hope visitors will be able to glean some valuable information from my posts as it relates to their jobs; etc. I also hope others with contribute accordingly, correcting me if and where I'm wrong on something, and / or sharing some of their thoughts and experiences...