Spatial DBs and Jumping Java

Some news clips from projects that I find fascinating: The anticipated 2.3.0 cleanup release of SpatialLite is now out. Building on the highly efficient, blazing fast, feature-rich and highly-embeddable SQLLite , this geodb data store and engine might be a good option to address the call in the Shapefile 2.0 manifesto. I agree with the thoughts in the manifesto (I'm sick of managing many little files) and I'm all about keeping things simple, focused and efficient. So I'm going to watch this project with interest especially since spatial support in MySQL is going no where fast.

Also, after a long wait, Open JUMP is out with a new version. We dabbled with this years ago but got sick of Java-based desktop apps. In fact, recently we are finally getting on the .Net bandwagon and are working with MapWindows. Though I guess we are using Java a little on the desktop through our CUPSS [1][2] [3] project (it uses Trolltech/Nokia Jambi that wraps Qt with Java). We generally have had to get away from supporting systems other than Windows for a variety of reasons :-( Hopefully we'll be able to get back into the platform-agnostic game soon.

ESRI Dev Summit Keynote: SOAP vs REST

Watch this if you are involved in web services . Period.

http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2009/04/07/esri-posts-david-chappells-2009-developer-summit-keynote/

Also, if you want to see the power and sexy appeal of the ESRI Flex API, behold this
http://www.mdimap.com/imap/

Move to the cloud

For a group like mine that writes software for modeling and other computationally intensive code from scratch, moving code from early 2000-era single CPU approaches to SMP approaches (or even clustering) is a painful but probably required undertaking. We've discussed it, but the business cases (or the requests in the way of $$) have not materialized so we didn't fix what wasn't broken.

But, I wonder if we should just skip all of this and move the model to take advantage of the flexibility of cloud computing. Enterprise providers are convinced Cloud will scratch many itches and announcements like this ( [1] [2] [3]) Sun and IBM's investment in Cloud, and Cisco's leap of faith into building server fabrics because, "[cloud computing] is the future of the data center. It will evolve into clouds and change business models forever" make the question compelling.

For us in the niche world, we have to ask does the investment make sense? Where does Cloud stop being useful? When is it best used? When should you not use it?