[postgis-users] I have an ArcGIS-PostGIS connector.

[Abe Gillespie]

Well, that's not 100% true, but I got your attention. Here's the thing:

Two or three months ago I spent nearly two months of almost full time work 
on creating a plugin for connecting PostGIS to ArcGIS (I was working with 
ArcGIS 8.3 at the time). My plans were to offer the plugin commercially so I 
kept my work private. Because my plans were commercial, I wanted this to be 
a very professional piece of software. This isn't a custom layer, or an ODBC 
connector -- this is an actual custom datasource so ArcGIS can work with the 
data as natively as possible. I got very far with it. I can load point, 
line, and polygon type layers. And then suddenly I hit a wall. Obviously 
it's important to have read AND write access to PostGIS. Well, getting my 
PostGIS layers writable proved insanely fleeting. I made sure I set every 
property, implemented every interface, etc., such that ArcGIS would see the 
layer as editable. No dice. Every time I started an edit session ArcGIS saw 
*something* it didn't like with the layer and came back with an error (I 
don't remember what now though). In addition to the wall I hit I've become 
too busy to concentrate on it.

What now:

I'm seriously considering releasing this to the public as OSS. I've had 
great success with other community projects like MapServer and OF COURSE 
PostGIS. It would be very satisfying to see all this work actually go 
somewhere and I would feel I'm doing my part to "give back" to the 
community. I'd love to see where we can take this. The only stipulations I 
have are keeping the original project name "zigGIS," setting up a 
professional project site for it (my company can do the website design ... 
we already have some pamphlets for it), and original credit rests with 
Essejnet. I would also like to stay involved as much as I can. Perhaps all I 
need is a jumpstart. So, if anyone's interested in helping to complete this 
project, please contact me.

Technology used:

- The entire code base is in C# and takes advantage of it's COM abilities.
- The wonderful Nini configuration library for writing the DB connection 
files (http://nini.sourceforge.net/).
- log4net for ... well ... logging of course :) (
http://logging.apache.org/log4net/)
- Npgsql for database interaction (
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/npgsql/projdisplay.php).
- Is that it?

That's it. Thanks for your consideration!

-Abe
http://www.essejnet.com
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