Friday, July 22, 2005

ArcGIS Server 9.2 (Java): Coming soon to a GIS near you

The ESRI User Conference is around the corner and it's time to talk about what the future holds for our users. Before I delve into the details let me say this: ArcGIS Java users, we have heard you! Here's what the future holds for you:


  • A pure Java experience: No more query interfacing... no proxies to deal with... The Java programmer will get an API s/he lives by - pure Java... diagnostic exception handling... established design patterns... the whole shebang... you name it we got it!

  • A rich SDK experience with Eclipse plug-ins to help you get easily started with using ArcGIS... one click deploy and run of samples... ready to use application templates... code snippets... an integrated and intuitive help system...

  • The web tier is being reworked to leverage state of the art technologies (if you are thinking AJAX you are right, but there's MORE)... how about the ability to work with multiple data sources - ArcGIS, ArcIMS, ArcWeb Services... how about the ability to add your custom source... dynamic layer reordering and grouping... network analysis... the list goes on...

  • Geoprocessing: You'll get a pure Java experience with GP too - tools, Java data types, geoprocessor, exceptions... You can also build your own custom tool / model, use a tool generator to generate a pure Java class for the same and just like that you are ready to incorporate new GP functionality into your Java GIS.

  • OTB EJBs to integrate GIS with your J2EE infrastructure.


All this and more will be discussed at the UC in a couple of sessions:

  • ArcGIS Road Ahead: What's Coming for GIS Developers at 9.2

    • Offering I - Wed 8:30 AM Room: 6A (SDCC)

    • Offering II - Thu 1:30 PM Room: 6A (SDCC)



  • ArcGIS Road Ahead: What's Coming in ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server at 9.2

    • Offering I - Tue 1:30 PM Room: 6A (SDCC)

    • Offering II - Thu 8:30 AM Room: 6A (SDCC)




I'm sure you are rushing to add them to your agenda! Also, here's the UC Q and A for more info...

See ya!

Sunday, July 3, 2005

The JSF evolution

It's been more than 2 years since I started looking into JSF. JSF was in its early access avatar then and the JSF community felt like a startup trying to find its way into the unknown. And now 2 years on it's very heartening to see such wide spread industry support for JSF with any number of IDE vendors supporting it, every other technology on the block showcasing how it too can be integrated with JSF, JSF being the prime topic at many a J1 discussions, et al...

We at ESRI have been showcasing our GIS components for the past 2 JavaOnes. Doreen presented them in 2004 and Steve did it this year. They were well received on both occasions. But what has been even more interesting to me is the changing developer perspectives between J1 2004 and 2005 with regard to JSF. Last year they were just intrigued by this new technology and wanted to see what it was all about. This time around folks had a lot better understanding of it (they had either read extensively about it or actually used it themselves) and they wanted to see how they could actually use it in their organizations.

True JSF has its faults but IMO industry wide support should definitely tip the scales in its favor when it comes to developers choosing which framework to use in their new projects. But even without industry support I firmly believe that JSF has more merits than chinks. It does have a steep learning curve but when you are over it it's worth the effort in gold - it makes you think "components" and not request parameters, you now write business logic in POJOs and not worry about how the controller will call into them, you perform actions in simple methods in backing beans and not in an obscure action form or servlet - the list just goes on...

It's the same learning curve that one has to wade through when s/he went from procedural programming to OOP, from just getting the job done to perusing the GoF design patterns and employing them in their projects... It takes time but the end result is that you are a better programmer because of it.

Saturday, July 2, 2005

Annotation use cases

My first blog here but will cut straight to the point.

The most talked about feature at J1 this year was annotations. It was as if every new API / framework had to have support for annotations or must have something pertaining to it on their radar to gain acceptance or even be considered a contender.

I have not yet being able to make my mind if this profileration of @YeahIHaveAnAnnotationToo is a good thing or not. For the time being I am trying to come up with use cases of where annotations make sense. Here are some that I have assimilated from various blogs, J1 sessions and my own brain dumps:

1. Dependency injection.


  • The @Resource and the @EJB annotations introduced by EJB3 are obvious examples of dependency injections. Any custom framework will have some notion of a context or an environment or a manager and injecting such resources into users' classes would make a lot of sense.


2. Aspects (boiler plate stuff handled by the container / framework) and interceptors

  • The @TransactionAttribute annotation associates a transaction aspect to a method. @Query and @Update annotations introduced by JDBC 4.0 perform tasks which go beyond just boiler plate - they actually populate and manipulate objects which directly affect business logic. I've put interceptors alongwith aspects coz I consider interceptors as an implementation technique for aspects (Correct me if I am wrong). I think one needs to be really careful when designing annotations in this category because taking this route could be a slippery slope - you design a bunch of annotations which perform certain core tasks and your co-developer has his/her own set of tasks which s/he religiously believes are "core" and your manager feels that it's critical to design a third set to appease that billion $ client. IMO, for this category of annotations just design those which strictly do boiler plate stuff and don't necessarily alter the business state for the client.


3. Callback methods

  • The @PostActivate and @PrePassivate ones fall in this category. I am not sure if I am a fan of annotations in this category. Basically with this all you are trying to do is eliminate the need to implement certain interfaces. Which means all you gain is that you don't need to have empty implementations for methods that you don't need. But it becomes very difficult for somebody to understand what contracts your object fulfills or which methods are actually designated as callbacks. One might argue that objects are no longer POJOs if they have to adhere to some framework specific interfaces - if this argument is important for you then implement callback listeners (an alternative that EJB3 also provides) to achieve this objective.


4. Container contracts

  • Tagging an EJB as @Stateless and @Stateful makes it known to the container how it should treat that bean. Moreover, it also sets a programming pattern for the user how to access and use these objects. Most marker annotations could be included in this category. So if your framework needs to handle certain objects in specific ways, you could think about such annotations.


5. Programmatic access to metadata for classes, fields and methods.

  • This is an oft forgotten use case but one which I think makes sense for UI objects. While it's a given that it's important to publish information regarding a method or a field's behavior through detailed comments and Javadocs; for UI objects this information may also need to be presented to the user on desktop panels and HTML forms. So the next time you author a UserBean think about associating a runtime @Description annotation with the username and password fields so as to give consistent descriptions for these fields across different views of your app.


(I'll try to add more as I get my head around it more (or if you have any more points for me).)

While this push toward annotated POJOs for everything might be a good thing; the thing that I fear is that Java classes of the future would have less Java code and more of annotations. It may become increasingly difficult for the user to deterministically gauge what behavior any given method would exhibit because what the method does could change dramatically depending on which annotations were applied when the method was actually called.

Not trying to attach a pessimistic annotation to annotations (what can I say, I love meta-anything!) but just waving a flag of caution before we head heads first into the annotated unknown...