Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Monday, April 13, 2009

Call for Content

The blog contains a variety of readers interested in different disciplines; enterprise, product management and methodology and ERDAS product related content. This is an open post to request from you the reader what subjects you would like to hear about or read about.

Just add your comment to this post and I will make sure to reply to your request.

SOAP vs. REST in Geospatial Applications

It's interesting to see the decision making process at organizations evaluating geospatial technologies. One area that I see a lot of "effort" from an IT and developer stakeholders in Geospatial Software Purchases is in the form, function and ROI of the technologies REST or SOAP. This is being driven on the enterprise side of the house where these technologies are essentially thier choice of which to invest in.

The ESRI Developer Summit Keynote provides a good technology overview by Dave Chappel on "SOAP vs. REST". Probably for people at a decision maker level trying to understand the technology and "keywords" or end users trying to get a better understanding of the technology, this is a good starting point.

Two areas that is always analyzed and heavily weighed in any evaluations is INTEROPERABILIY and SECURITY, and this is where SOAP clearly becomes the "leader of the pack" in technologies today. This is with any technology that these two categories are scrutinized. The requirement for proprietary REST client interfaces is such a drawback of the technology. Why would I want to have to integrate a proprietary interface in everything that I want geospatial data and have a proprietary client interface integration effort to 'work' with my GI and services? The pushback in that process is definately "loud and clear" from the market. In terms of security, you CAN secure REST endpoints, this is not a problem, but a lack of any standard to do so and/or the client interfaces proper ability to handle security rhealms must be accounted for, you shouldn't have to 'poke' at it to find out if it works. Again, same theme, proprietary is a big blocking issue there.

Mr. Chappell raises a good point in that SOAP is not "easy" to manage from the client side of the house as managing XML isn't the easiest or most eloquent. Fortunately in the GI space, everybody already supports the standardized services (WMS, WCS, WFS, etc, etc), so the "effort" and ability to handle it with standard interoperable client interfaces is widely prolifererated and highly available, so i think that point is rather 'mute'.

Don't get me wrong, REST is a GREAT technology, it simply needs some standards bodies to define how and where they will be used to get the same ROI and proliferation as the well defined SOAP services today. This process is firing up with the OGC right now. Hope the conjur up something useful with that... :)

Friday, April 10, 2009

EAIM 2009 R2 Released

The ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager 2009 R2 has officially been RELEASED!! The performance improvements are incredible! HUGE Volumes of imagery in their original formats delivered even faster! Please request the EAIM Performance Benchmarks Whitepaper to see the numbers...I'm very, very happy with the results.

The new high performance catalog with CSW interface has made such a huge difference in all aspects of the software. Not only from a user experience in WMS and CSW Catalog Search response times but the ability of a single server to handle a large load of web clients, concurrent GI Crawlers and CPU intensive jobs (i.e. Clip, Zip and Ship).

GET READY for the market previews of the ERDAS APOLLO Web Processing Service (WPS)!!!! I've never been so excited about a software feature before!! A preview will be coming in the NEW ERDAS Labs website soon, so stay tuned!!