[postgis] ESRI client

[Paul Ramsey]

vorelon at fa.cvut.cz wrote:
> I am looking for something like ArcSDE from ESRI, full compatible for
> their clients, like ArcView and ArcIms.
>  Is PostGis the right journey for me?

If you're looking for "fully compatible" then take out your wallet and
give ESRI a call. ESRI products only give you all the great features
when used with ESRI servers (hmmm, this sounds familiar...). There are
some hacks to allow connectivity to things like PostGIS, but for a
seamless experience in the near term you will have to use SDE, because
that is the way ESRI wants it, and that is the way ESRI is going to keep
it.

I can only see one development path out of this quandry, and it is
phenomenally difficult: that is to build an "SDE interface" in front of
PostGIS which speaks the SDE wire protocol. It's phenomenally difficult
because the SDE wire protocol is proprietary, and would have to be
deduced from reading the packets off of the wire, in the same way the
SAMBA developers read the MicroSoft SMB file-sharing protocol. It should
be noted that the effort took them several years to get working
reasonably well.

For the moment, we'll have to be happy with hacks around ESRI-imposed
limitations, and hopefully will see some nice non-ESRI clients start to
spring up. We've heard several folks on the list express an interest in
these kinds of things in the past, so who knows what the future holds.

P.

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