[postgis-users] Re: PostGIS and ESRI

[Angus Carr]

Hi, guys.

I've been thinking hard about the possibilities of adding in the components 
to ArcGIS to talk to PostGIS. I've (unfortunately) been an Arc user for a 
while, and I'm stuck inside the slightly byzantine world of programming for 
Arc 8 right now.

Would it be useful to the PostGIS community to start looking at how much work 
it would be to develop the right bits inside the ESRI framework? If I do, I'm 
positive I can release the code that comes out of it.

I'm not sure how much is involved. I suspect rather a lot. In an ideal world, 
it would be a matter of subclassing the right thingummy and overloading the 
member functions. But I already know it won't be that easy. I have that 
annoying itch at the back of my head...

In the interests of full disclosure, I work for a consulting company that is 
an ESRI Business Partner. I don't know of anything that prevents me from 
releasing code associated with this idea, but I would have to check. The 
documentation and so on is freely available on the web, so they're not that 
fussy about disclosure...

Anyone else interested in "casing the joint" and helping me figure out what's 
needed?

Angus.

On Wednesday 03 April 2002 07:45 pm, you wrote:
> Hi guys, particularly Frank and Paul,
> Re: these messages (below) from last fall.  Could either of you, or others
> comment on where things have come/gone in the meantime?  I.e. how close
> (read: how much development needed) are we to having something to work with
> ArcGIS in particular.  I know there's been a lot of dialogue going around
> on this stuff, but I thought maybe it would be a good time especially for
> new users like to me to get a bit of an update on using PostGIS with OpenEV
> or and with ArcGIS (via OLE DB).
> Any comments?
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-----
>
> [postgis] Re: PostGIS and ESRI
> Paul Ramsey postgis at yahoogroups.com
> Fri, 21 Sep 2001 15:36:19 -0700
>
> "Matt.Wilkie" wrote:
> > Do you see PostGIS ever being in a position to work with (and/or
> > replace) ArcSDE and [Oracle|DB2|SQL|etc]?
>
> Hi Matt,
>
> PostGIS/PostgreSQL should, long term, be able to replace ArcSDE, Oracle
> Spatial, and DB2 Spatial. That is the goal. That is why we are working
> so hard to follow the OpenGIS "Simple Features for SQL" specification.
>
> When you ask whether PostGIS can "work with" ArcSDE/OracleSpatial/DB2 I
> assume you are actually asking whether the desktop software which
> currently works with those products (mostly ArcGIS/ArcView/ArcINFO but
> also GeoMedia and MapInfo and AutoCAD) will eventually be able to work
> with PostGIS as a spatial backend. And in the short term the answer is
> "no", because ESRI holds an effective desktop monopoly on GIS
> viewers/editors which they are using to push their own client/server
> protocol: the protocol used by ArcSDE.
>
> In the longer term (12-24 months) there is a moderate probability that
> the Web Feature Server standard will begin to open up the client/server
> communication path, and as the commercial vendors start to implement WFS
> in their software, we will already be there. Most of the hard stuff
> about WFS (transactions, locking, intersections, buffers, other
> topologic operations) can be done by a spatial database, if you have
> one, and we do (or at least, we will). But that is a ways out.
>
> In the short term, there is Mapserver as a PostGIS client. I imagine
> sometime soon, either GRASS or OpenEV or OpenMap will end up supporting
> PostGIS as a data source as well. But it'll be slow going and for now
> we'll be writing our own clients. If we're lucky, forward-looking
> companies like Byers will include PostGIS as a part of their own desktop
> GIS software offerings. The future is hard to see, but I think we're on
> the right track.
>
> Hope that helps,
> Paul
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-----
>
> [postgis] Re: PostGIS and ESRI
> Frank Warmerdam postgis at yahoogroups.com
> Fri, 21 Sep 2001 22:16:52 -0400
>
> Guys,
>
> I just wanted to add a few points to this.
>
>   o OpenEV support PostGIS now via the OGR link for reading, though not yet
> for
>     update.  It would be sweet to add write back to OGR to OpenEV, and
> perhaps
>     some smarts for browsing tables, and doing spatial and attribute
> queries
>     from OpenEV.
>
>   o It should be possible to serve read-only data to ArcGIS from PostGIS
> via
>     an OGR based OLE DB provider, though I haven't tried building the
> PostGIS
>     link for OGR on Windows yet, nor will this work fully till the upcoming
>     ArcGIS Service Pack 2 release this fall.
>
> I would really like to update OGR to match with all the PostGIS 0.6
> services
> and get a nice Linux build of OGR tools that can be used as an auxilary
> set of tools for loading PostGIS, and doing operations like reprojecting
> layers.
>
>
>
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