Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Monday August 16, 2004

Geospatially spending my time

There've been no updates for a while due in part to this event. In addition to putting together a demo that the demo gods decided to strike me down for on Saturday (8/7), I had 2-3 other demos to prep for at the Sun booth on the exhibition floor. I spent a lot of time talking with customers doing things in the GIS space with Sun technology, be it hardware, software or both.

For posterity's sake, we had a booth with four different demos at it. The intent was for people to spend time seeing all four, then giving us comments, getting a T-Shirt, and registering for a Leather Jacket.

Working left to right, the first demo was J2ME technology on our Wireless Toolkit. ESRI has their on ArcWeb Services wireless toolkit (there's is an API, ours is something you use with an IDE to develop code). We consumed some of my ArcWeb credits showing people how you could use their toolkit in conjunction with our emulators to develop different solutions. Some of the people that spend time on research and development at ESRI were involved with JSR-179. That meant we had a MIDP/CLDC based MIDlet running on a couple of emulators showing off some of the ArcWeb J2ME toolkit features. Since we were running on an emulator, which had no support for the JSR-179 APIs, you couldn't do location based stuff (i.e. the device finds it's position and does mapping based on that), but we could show the flexibility of the toolkit. With multiple people I had conversations about "first responder" type J2ME apps.

With the toolkit ESRI's put together in conjunction with an end users own code and devices with support for other JSRs, a government group for instance could quickly put together some cool apps. The one I kept throwing out as an example is that you could use ESRI's ArcWeb Services Wireless toolkit with JSR-179 and JSR-120 to write an app that would allow an organziation do an SMS push out to a bunch of devices in the hands of first responders. This could launch the app on the device, let the app find it's location, then if the device was in the correct area the user would be directed to take some kind of action with supporting GIS information on what needs to be done. We have all the APIs and the devices are on the way, so hopefully it won't be too long until we see these kinds of apps.

The second one was ESRI's Java ADF (Application Development Framework) Java Server Faces components running in a JSR-168 portlet on the Sun Java System Portal Server, with authentication and authorization through the Sun Java System Access Manager. This was on top of the Sun Java Enterprise System, running on a V20z on Solaris Express (Solaris 10 for those who are not buzzword enabled).

The concept here is a typical use case in the GIS industry. Say I'm a city government, and I want to provide some GIS data to the County, State or Federal government. Historically, I'd have to ship them all of my data or provide for some way to have an analyst put together the info they need.

Well, with ArcGIS 9's Java ADF, Portal, Access Manager and the Liberty support, an org can pretty quickly take existing GIS infrastructure, deploy it to a portal (or just an app server) and then federate the identities of multiple organizations to allow access.

For instance, say I am with a city government. I want to be able to give varying levels of access to my GIS data to county, state and federal organizations. Using Access Manager's support for the Liberty APIs, I can federate the identities between the two orgs and then users can easily get access to the data they're authorized for. All of this is without having to set up specific usernames and passwords and handle all of the maintenance that goes along with that. Pretty cool stuff!

I didn't have the hardware or the time to set up the Federated Identity part, but I was able to set up Portal, Access Manager all backed by Directory in about 45 minutes thanks to Java Enterprise System. Then getting the portlet running was about another 45 minutes-- most of that taken up with figuring out how to get the WAR file on the appropriate network. I was very, very pleased.

The third station was pretty much getting awareness out about the Java Location Services website. It's effectively a 'portal' (no, not that kind of portal) for Java developers working with GIS.

And finally, saving one of the best for last (though it's hard to pick a favorite), we set up Sun Java Studio Creator to work with Java Server Faces components that are part of ArcGIS 9 Server. Not quite yet, but with a coming service pack from ESRI, you'll be able to import the JAR into creator and visually design a new application that uses those JSF components to integrate GIS services.

Since Creator is designed to easily work with Databases and Web Services, the developer can very quickly stitch together different services already in their enviroment with these new GIS services. Doreen Brinkman had a good talk on this at the "Building Real-World-Ready UI Components for the Web Using JavaServer Faces Technology session at JavaOne.

It's also this last one that lead to this press release.

It's a bit off-topic to be showing hardware at this GIS show, but I did have a W1100z workstation that I was showing the J2ME demo on. It was kind of fun to look at the reactions of people when they ask what such a system costs, and I could honestly say it's free. :) Then I had a V20z running the portal server and all of the other workstations were either the 'head' on the Sun Blade 2500 or two Sun Rays hung off of it. One was a 150 model and the other was the 1G with the very nice looking 24" LCD attached.

Sorry for the long blog entry, but like I said above I wanted to capture what I've been doing for the last couple weeks for posterity's sake. Plus I was feeling guilty for not having blogged. I have a couple other pent up entries on the way, worry not. :)

If you were at the show, please drop me some feedback (email or comments) on this stuff. Actually, drop me the comments even if you weren't at the show. I talked to a number of customers about this stuff, and they were all fun conversations-- sometimes we don't get to see everything people are doing with our technology.