Post-pre - Pre

I do not like wikis, SharePoint and a good many products from Microsoft. This includes Windows on phones - even the sexy new OS (tried it on the HTC Touch Pro and took it back immediately). My nerd-friends know this. These friends also know that we are a Sprint family for better or worse (we've had respectable service from the Sprint network and honestly we've always found them to provide excellent customer service and value as well. They also are willing to admit when they screw up and will cut you a deal. Verizon and AT&T do not want your business badly enough to incentivize you to stay). So, as a Sprint user, iPhone is out for now. Verizon's phones have never spoken to me, though Blackberry's would work fine if I could use them with my work email servers and not pay extra.

So, what I know is that I'm staying with Sprint for a while. This really should be OK because all I need is a phone with a modern browser, an OS that doesn't get in my way ( Windows), syncs with M$ Exchange, top-notch calendaring/contacts/texting, and is responsive. I also must have a vertical keyboard and will pay extra for a physical keyboard. So, I'm left with Crackberry and some device from our friends at Palm. As a historical Palm user (currently running a Centro after many years with a Treo 650), I will stay with Palm. Therefore, after all this I will eventually own a Pre.

I've been watching the reports about the Pre and all the comparisons to the iPhone. Firstly, if I wanted an iPhone badly enough I would switch to AT&T -- I don't have to have an iPhone. I just need a phone that provides many of the same benefits as an iPhone - and in my case I also want a physical keyboard. I do not consider the Pre as an iPhone-wanna-be, I see it as just another "modern" phone (with "modern" once again defined for us by Apple).

The reports I've also seen speak about the let-down some people have had with the Pre (poor quality, still missing SDK, anemic selection of apps). I'd be lying if I said these reports didn't sadden me a little. But, I'm willing to cut Palm some slack as they rapidly push out a huge new platform - there will be bugs/issues. That said, I really need Palm to get the Pre platform cleaned up and silky smooth within 6 months. It seems like they have a trajectory to do that. But they still have some major hurdles.

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?

When your background data don't change

I am watching the MapTiler project closely now. I once started to look into the GDAL2Tiles utility to scratch an itch I had for making simple online maps from data data would not change with any real frequency (never -> semi-annually). The itch went away so I stopped playing around, but it was a reasonable option at the time.

Now that the project has a GUI and someone providing care and feeding, I also have had the itch return. So, I might get a chance to run with this ball after all.

I am really enjoying watching the OSgeo ecosphere mature as the standards of WMS, TMS, GeoJSON, GeoRSS, KML, etc seep into the industry. It is just getting ridiculously easy to integrate stuff in basic ways.

Notes from Fee

James Fee has some good notes from the ESRI Dev Summit this year. He also has a nice show regarding using the Openlayers API against services from ArcGIS Server. The exact support for ESRI-specific services in OL 2.8 depends on what came out of the 2.8 release triage meeting.

I am excited about the prospects of true OL support for ESRI services.

If you follow this thread through to the end, it sounds like there is some chance that Arc* support will make it into the 2.8 OpenLayers release at least in experimental form.

I feel compelled to reuse the Lord of the Rings quote in a techy context (I know this is getting cliche):

"One framework to rule them all, one framework to find them, one framework to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."