Dave Bouwman had the humorous idea of organizing a wake for Web ADF at this year’s ESRI International User Conference following ESRI’s announcement that Web ADF will be deprecated following ArcGIS Server 10.1 next year.
We’ll definitely be there and, like many, we’re pumped about the considerable advantages in the development experience going from Web ADF to REST.
At the same time, I don’t want to be perceived as being too flippant about the matter of Web ADF being deprecated at 10.1… there are hundreds (if not thousands) of organizations out there that have invested heavily in Web ADF based on the notion that it was to be ESRI’s core platform for the future and that it represented the best (or only) available alternative at the time they selected it.
There are natural technology deprecations, and there are more forced technology deprecations. Given there are lots of folks for whom Web ADF is actually working quite nicely now, ESRI’s announcement (while defensible and not a surprise for most) will have a real impact on many organizations and necessitate a transition they’d just as soon not make. Which sucks.
We’ve spent the last eighteen months transitioning our Geocortex Essentials product from being Web ADF-centric to being REST-centric. I’ll be drinking a beer partly celebrating a shift away from the challenges people (including us) have experienced with Web ADF, while also thinking about the work that will be involved for lots of folks out there who will need to rewrite a lot of their relatively recent custom code in which they’ve made significant investments.
I just find Arc Server to be a slow, horrible piece of software in general. Kudos to your company to trying to get Web ADF running, you succeeded where many failed. ESRI drank the Microsoft kool-aid and paid the performance price. One they will go back to writing things like ArcIMS with your beautiful interface or command line Arc/Info which at least could be called speedy. When most of the cool high speed web sites like Google maps, Facebook and Wikipedia have totally ignored Microsoft and use the LAMP stack, ESRI needs get into the 21st century. The whole ArcGIS family just puts such a low priority on speed and ease of customization that it succeeded at all, shows how little competition there is in this area.
To survive this mess shows how strong you guys are.
Still using 9.2, huh? So, yeah, the WebADF is slow… believe me, I don’t hesitate to say it. But saying that ESRI isn’t moving forward is rediculous. It’s a GIS company, and relies on the advances of web tech to integrate. Of course, if you had to write the APIs from scratch, you would appreciate a little forgiveness in the version delays.
If you love Google so much, try out the ArcGIS G-maps API!
LAMP stack is not ubiquitous, and certainly not considering the penetration of Microsoft in Fortune 500. LAMP evangelists and microsoft evangelists alike need to focus
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