Brent Porter, GIS Programmer, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Presented at the 2011 Texas GIS Forum

1. We are the music makers and
we are the dreamers of dreams.
Brent Porter,
TCEQ

2. Who am I?
 Programmer and GIS Administrator for
ArcGIS Server and ArcSDE, TCEQ
 Austin Community College Adjunct
Professor
 Emergency Responder
 Examples
 - Hurricanes
 - Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

3. A little bit more about me
 Yes, I am an ESRI fanboy and
unrepentant at that!
 …but I am also a pragmatist and I care A
LOT more for solutions that work best in
a sustainable way with the least effort
possible.
 What? Yes I want to have my cake and
eat it too

4. Why That Title?
 Poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy
 Link – the phrase in the context of my
day to day work…
 This exemplifies my development
philosophy
 Dream Big!
 Interesting
 Fun for me

5. Why continued…
 Also, there is always someone wanting
to tell me that there are NO
snozzberries!
 As the experts in our field, it is our job to
teach those snozzberry doubters about
what we are doing and why
 And who doesn’t want to make music
and dream big dreams?!?!

6. Today’s topic
 Talk about how and why I made the dev
choices I made with a new experimental
template.
 Hopefully you’ll be inspired by what I am
innovating with the UI and some of the
other functionality.
 Deny the naysayers the satisfaction of
being right!

7. Why Javascript?
 By Steve Paine

8. Javascript
 They are starting them young now!
 Really though
 Mobile Development – lots of great mobile
javascript library support out there
 HTML 5 – browser vendors are actually in
agreement. All are working towards a set of
standards because of the mobile revolution.
 Works with Smartphones, Desktops,
Laptops, Tablets – all from a common
codebase!

9. What Javascript?
 Javascript API for ArcGIS Server/Dojo
 JQuery/JQuery UI & some plugins
 Google Maps API Geocoding Services
 Google Maps API Street View
 NodeJS
 Custom Javascript

10. JQuery/JQuery UI
 JQuery is one of the big open source
javascript libraries out that is getting
used by lots of big companies to do great
user interactions
 Easy learning curve for basic functions
and well documented

11. JQuery/JQuery UI
 JQuery UI adds widgets and other
skinning effects
 Easy to choose one of the many themes
for the look and feel of your app
 Or you can create your own with the
ThemeRoller!

12. Google Maps API Geocoder
 Wait a second…ESRI Fanboy, confusion
what’s going on?
 I’ve spent too much time wrestling with
the ESRI geocoding service
 I’ve even given talk here at the Conf in ’08
on it
 ESRI works great for basic ‘vanilla’
geocoding (simple addresses, cities)
 Other than this…. not so much!

13. Contrast this with Google’s
Geocoder
 Very forgiving of user input…
 Great for place name searches for points
of interest and intersections
 Research into this topic has yielding
some interesting facts
 They use a spatial filter to prioritize the
return results
 Multiple methods for searching for some of
the values (AND, @, | (pipe)

14. More on locators
 Experiments on ESRI geocoder
 Lowering the Candidate Score Filter
(defaults to 80 in Javascript API)
 Removing the filter, adding a spatial filter
and then doing the score filter
 Adding in additional Place Name/Points of
Interest queries beyond the default through
pattern detection

15. Even MORE on geocoders
 Obviously there are ways of doing more
sophisticated things with the esri geocoding –
but lots of them have to do with having add on
datasets or features and additional
configurations but I ask you, Why?
 The google maps api geocoder just
works…given a little bit of configuration AND it
is easy to integrate with arcgis server

16. Google Maps API Street View
service
 Some groups of users really like Street
View
 Provides the ‘on the ground’ photo that is
necessary for some types of applications. It
really ties the map application to any
physical extension or coordination being
done
 Works great in conjunction with the Google
Maps Geocoder

17. Node.js
 Node.js – server side javascript. In
effect, javascript that runs through a run
time compiler on the server and only
emits results to any clients accessing it.
 Based on the concept of event driven
programming
 Yeah… but WHY?

18. Why?
 Is Node.js that fabled silver bullet of
programming?
 No
 But it can be very useful for a certain problem
space in application development
 According to a mashable.com article back in March of this
year – [Node.js] is great for event-driven low latency,
concurrent apps
 So… things like a massive online scrabble application!
 Or, a chat server for clients

19. Facilitating Collaboration in
geospatial applications
 There is a real need for a certain kind of
application to enable real-time
collaboration in conjunction with a map
 Emergency Response
 Law Enforcement
 Outreach with particular users
 Recognizing the need I set out to
develop a solution we could use with
Javascript

20. The solution
 Node.js has a simple chat app/client you
can make with only a minimal effort
 Link to the chat server through an iframe
in your javascript app and you have what
we see in the demo

21. And on that note…
 What if users wanted the ability to share
a common operation picture?
 They already want this and there are
umpteen thousand viewers that can be used
for THAT!
 What about being able to share a common
map view/extent and layer list in near real
time (with a 3-5 second delay)?!?!

22. Geocollaboration Manager
 We are experimenting with building a
custom app that allows a single user(pc)
at a time, to act as Cartographic
facilitator. AND some number of clients
that would see the results from the
cartographic facilitator.
 Let’s look at a diagram of the
architecture

23. Flow

24. Geocollaboration Session Data
MAPVIEW_ID MAPVIEW_URL BASEMAP_ID MAPSCALE MAPPRJ FK_SESSION_ID FK_GROUP_ID STATUS MAPWIDTH MAPHEIGHT LAYERS_ACTIVE
347 url to rest service 23 24000 4269 1 1 Inactive 400 300 1,2,6,7
348 url to rest service 4 24000 4269 1 1 Active 800 600 2,3,4,5,8

25. Take aways
 This functionality provides a level of ‘commonality’ for
purposes of collaborating without doing desktop
sharing sessions that isn’t out there yet.
 It is also possible to extend this so that we take those
parameters stored for any particular session and
create a record of the time spent in collaboration – the
images are stored with the session or the url to the
session. A ‘map book’ could be created and sent to
the attendees.
 Future research – trying to use some of the
advantages of Node.js as a potential avenue for
reducing the computational cost of the collaboration
manager component.

26. So…
 Remember that the technology option you choose is a
consideration for successful application development
 But, as technology matures and APIs and languages
get better about working across differences, it isn’t the
biggest consideration.
 Most important to be successful is to have the right
attitude…

27.  keep asking questions!
 Dream big
 Make music
 Take chances
 Fight the snozzberry haters

28. Questions?
 My email at TCEQ
 bporter@tceq.texas.gov