It’s been a busy year so far and therefore my posting has been woefully slow. Much have my time has been working with Google Earth Builder. This provides a new way of distributing geospatial information from Google into all sorts of clients, providing a true geospatial platform as a service without the need to worry about how many servers or virtual servers you need to support your clients, allowing GIS experts to worry about geospatial information science rather than geospatial information systems. There will be more information coming out about this platform over the next few months and I hope I...

I was giving a presentation at an ESRI gathering hosted in reading at Microsoft this week, talking about all things Silverlight and MapIt, and very little unsurprisingly about the Flex API. During a presentation about the Web API’s I mentioned JavaScript and Silverlight as two offerings that whilst can do similar things, need to be considered carefully in relation to the audience in questioning and the tasks they wish to perform. Now I like the Silverlight API and as I mentioned in the talk it can really allow for the avoidance of browser support pain by abstracting away the layer between your...

There has been a long standing rule of thumb when deciding how many instances to give a map service to give optimal performance. Finding this information has sometimes been hard although surprisingly when asked for this information the other day, and failing to find it, I decided to see if it was on the new resource centre. Fortunately the is a page on services performance. http://resources.esri.com/enterprisegis/index.cfm?fa=performance.app.services Here it not only gives the ‘rule of thumb’ for the number of instances for a map service (2.5 * #CPUs) but also a whole series of information about...

I’ve been reading 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know on and off for the last few months. Not only does the book come with it’s own website where you can make comments on the pearls of wisdom within it’s pages. It also helped me understand that the problems I’ve faced in Architecture over the last year are very common and that architecture whilst not exactly an art will never be a science either. In terms of the content there are three main items that stand out for me within the book. 1) Don’t put your resume ahead of the requirements. There is sometimes a relentless pressure...

It seems in this increasingly twitter fuelled world that anyone starting a blog must be certified. Surely the world can’t read more than 140 characters anymore, why bother making them? Well always one to buck the trend, I thought it might be a good time to start a blog. Hmm a blog, what should it be on? ArcGIS, nope plenty of those, Programming, nope loads of those also. GeoNerdRage? Nope I can name a few of those also So in order to start this blog I decided on the theme of performance and scalability, the architecture of such and the technologies that can help people design and develop...