ClearlyVague - Dev Blog

Spring and JSF integration-frustration

November 12, 2008 – 8:31 pm
I have not posted in quite some time but I ran into a small problem today that I hadn't seen in many spring/JSF integration documents. Our current thick application is heavily dependent upon spring to wire together our views/controllers/and web services. Originally, there were naming conflicts between beans. A naming scheme was devised similar to java package naming where "."s are used in combination with the name (i.e. mycontext.geographicmap.mapattribute). Recently I began working with JSF and knew that "." has a different meaning when used in JSF El processing. For example, #{mapcontext.attributes} is going to call the attributes property. However, I thought my DelegatingVariableResolver would be smart enough to know that to spring those "." don't mean the same as in JSF. However, since JSF is calling the DelegatingVariableResolver, that expression is already parsed before it gets to the spring classes. Long story short, if you're integration JSF and Spring, make sure your spring ...

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Eclipse RCP and ArcObjects.

August 12, 2008 – 1:38 pm
I'm not sure how much information is out there relative for Eclipse RCP and ArcObjects integration. I've starting doing some side-development using eclipse RCP and so far it is very impressive. Eclise RCP takes care of all the boilerplating every application needs for menu items, popups, window management, view management, persistence, and even some SOA (to name a few) . There is a pretty steep learning curve though, so anyone with some great Eclipse RCP references please post! Especially if they involve lessons learned in terms of ArcObject integration. **Update (9.18.09) I eventually got this to work using ArcObjects and some of the pretty helpful built in IDE support from Eclipse (technically Jbuilder 2008). Using the Plug-in development wizards, I was able to build a rather rich application with Eclipse RCP and integrate a Map, table of contents, and a toolbar. In terms of lessons learned - I think most people who have tried ...

Posted in Eclipse RCP, GIS, code, java | No Comments »

Google wants us all to be cartographers

June 25, 2008 – 11:50 am
Google continuing its advancement in the GIS domain, now supplies end users with the chance to become cartographers. Google Map Maker provides you will the tools to build maps for uncharted areas. This is very similar (or possibly even a subset) of mapplets. Check it out: http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Yahoo WOEID (Where on Earth ID)

May 16, 2008 – 11:34 am
Got something that is Geo-permanent? Want to give it a unique ID? Well this is where you should start. http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/

Posted in GIS, code | No Comments »

ArcObjects - Java, the damn interop, and threading considerations

April 3, 2008 – 1:27 am
One of the biggest complaints developers have about Java is that its slow. There are two big reasons for this. The first reason, which nothing can be done about, is that java is an interpreted language. That's what gives Java the power of platform independence. But since another layer of adaptation is added between your code and the operation system, its adds cost to your overall performance. The second reason is threading - and that developers don't usually consider it! Don't process on the Swing thread! Tha;s why you're application is slow. Java developers need to be conscious about the processing that is done on the event thread versus other threads in the application. A good start if you're wondering about this is the SwingWorker. Why does this relate to ArcObjects in Java? Events from the map, toc, and toolbar beans do not spawn from the awt event thread. Why? We'll I'm not too sure, but I ...

Posted in ESRI, GIS, Threading, code, java | No Comments »

Earth Hour - Today!

March 29, 2008 – 6:33 pm
Let's all take a big leap towards saving this planet by contributing to Earth Hour.

Posted in Green | No Comments »

ArcObjects - Catastrophic Failure - For a file not found?

March 29, 2008 – 3:01 am
Using ArcObjects - java, I received the following error message. Which then proceeded in killing the JVM. Ha-ha. Kind of overkill for not finding a file. I think the verbage is amusing. On that note, does anyone know if you can use relative paths when defining the bitmap path in a custom command? This is java, so if you have a .NET solution, doesn't help. I also tried to use RasterPicture::loadPicture(..), and this is what happened

Posted in ESRI, GIS, code, java | No Comments »

Pictures from Dev Summit

March 25, 2008 – 3:31 am
California was just so amazing that I had to post a few pics.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

ESRI Dev Summit Keynote Speaker

March 24, 2008 – 12:08 pm
This year's ESRI developer summit keynote speaker was Alan Cooper, author of the About Face and The Inmates are Running the Asylum. I'm sure other developers who attended the summit have written about his speech 20 times over already. So I'm not going to go into all the details about it. I will focus on a couple of topics he discussed that I thought were spot on, completely insightful and intuitive. The engineer with too many hats. Mr. Cooper discussed how he believes engineers take on too many roles and, by doing so, is detrimental (his exact term was toxic) to a company's success and longetivy. I completely agree. I don't think that management can make an engineer do so many different roles and expect 100% effectiviness out of each one. Now that isn't to say that each person can only do one job, because people need to multitask in any environment. But, ...

Posted in ESRI, GIS, code | No Comments »

ESRI Developer Summit (Day 4)

March 21, 2008 – 12:59 pm
Already the final day of the summit. That went by really fast. I'm kind of glad to go home because my work back in MA is piling up. Developing Defense Applications Using Military Analyst and MOLE: This presentation was probably the most relevant to what I do for work. There were there aspects of this presentation, one to show the new coordinate tool API, another to show the MOLE symbol API, and finally to how how that integrates with ArcServer. All there parts were really interesting (to someone who uses these tools on a day to day basis - like a MOLE or MIL STD developer). In short, the coordinate tool API integrates the original 200 or so datums that come with GeoTrans with the ones in ArcObjects. The MOLE symbol API seems to be a leap in the right direction. Although it was stated its not a replacement for FEGraphics, the MOLE symbol API models ...