“Architect”…proving my value in Agile and GIS

In my RSS aggregator, I’ve been seeing a lot of talk on the role of an architect in the IT industry. Periodically there is a flurry of commentary out on the web generally revolving around the question “What is an architect?” Alan, a technology evangelist over on the MSDN blogs, references a recent article in the Architectural Journal discussing the role of architects in software development. Additionally, Tom Hollander provides his thoughts on the role, duties, and primary competencies of architects in the larger development project. In some sense, the need for discourse on the nature and value of architects on a dev team indicates that folks are still having trouble quantifying the value of a solution, enterprise, infrastructure, etc. architect in their organization. This is of particular relevance and concern to me…because the “a” word is in my job title.

Sequence diagrams sans desktop software

So we’ve been doing some upfront design work for a client who’s managing their dev processes using RUP. Technically we’re in the elaboration phase and we’ve had a need to do a bunch of sequence diagramming for some implementation briefs. First off, let me say that after having a whole stack of sequence diagrams to do, I’m just about done with Visio. To get things to go smoothly in Visio we had to download some third party UML 2 templates here, which is no biggie really, but the constant random formatting changes when moving things around and the ridiculous semantic errors despite an apparently correct model have caused significant hair loss or greying on my team.

Agile conversations at the dev summit

Much like Chris over at GeoScrum, I’ve been carefully listening for Agile-speak here at the developer summit because I’m keenly interested in what the rest of the industry is going in their development pathways at the same time our team is adopting Scrum and looking for opportunities to exercise our skills.  On Monday night, I had some good informal conversations around the water cooler (read: “beer cooler”) with other developers while we enjoyed the welcome festivities. While standing with Chris and Dave, a couple of questions on a common theme arose:

How, as consultants, do you folks keep the lights on as an agile shop if you don’t do fixed fee, fixed deliverable contracts?

Podcast on the docket for tomorrow…

Spending some time this evening making some notes and preparing my thoughts for a podcast that Brady and I will be giving tomorrow.  We’re going to be speaking with the ESRI folks about some of the work we’ve been doing with their technology.  At this point, we’re planning on highlighting a couple of the more interesting projects we’ve been working on (Mobile ADF, Engine, Server) and also pointing to our plans for integration and interoperability of ESRI and other mapping technologies (VE, etc.).  Hopefully we’ll have the opportunity for me to spout off about Agile for awhile and discuss some of the coming trends in the web realm, etc.  The podcast recording is scheduled for 4:30 tomorrow and I’m still not sure at this point whether this will wind up in the ESRI site, our corporate site, or both.  Anyhow, I’ll post the link once I figure out where it’ll be.

First day impressions…quite REST-ful

Excellent first day at the ESRI Dev Summit.  The big story from my persepective was a pair of sessions summarizing the REST and JavaScript APIs being released at 9.3.  Dave has already provided a pretty good summary of the plenary, REST, and JavaScript API stuff over here so I won’t reiterate or reinvent the wheel. Suffice it to say that I echo the comments of others in that I’m impressed with this latest stuff from the dev team. DOJO based, Web 2.0, HTTP Goodness…it’s all there.

While I didn’t make the dev summit last year, I can say that this year’s message in terms of interoperability and integration so far has been entirely different from what I heard at the first conference. The first year that ESRI held this event I asked a lot of questions about OGC and interoperability and got some pretty non-commital answers. This year at the summit I’ve been here a day and we’ve had all sorts of mashups (VE, Google, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) as well as a demo viewing Image Server in a bona fide OGC client from Carbon Tools. This combination of ESRI technology with other vendors and standards within the Web 2.0 paradigm is frankly pretty exciting.

Other good news…there is no charge for using the REST or JavaScript APIs.  You do of course need an ArcGIS Server instance to leverage the REST stuff and to have a base map, but assuming you have access to map data, you could still roll your own REST API for whatever technology you are using (SQL 2008 Spatial comes to mind) and leverage the JavaScript API with no problems.  All good…

ESRI dynamic display…some limitations

Recently I was working on a portion of a large ArcEngine development project in which we had requirements to draw a large number of point features in the map at changeable time intervals as short as ½ second in such a way as to avoid the map flashing or blinking at the user.  A brief look out on the ESRI site pointed me to the IDynamicMap interface and a pretty comprehensive example of how to use the dynamic map to rapidly render dynamic features.  There’s a whole nifty little dynamic display API that supports rendering in this environment.So off I went, charging down that alley and I subsequently bothered to carefully read the “destructions” as well as the limitations page describing what the tradeoffs are that you make when using it.  The two biggies that stood out immediately were the diminished rendering quality and the lack of support for labeling/annotation.  Sacrificing map quality and labeling for speed makes sense on an intellectual level , but wasn’t going to make the client happy because the maps that were being published for consumption by ArcEngine featured labels and annotation as a prominent part of the map content and the user base wasn’t going to accept funky looking maps.  Several other things that weren’t on the list reared their ugly heads only after I’d done some development and testing and were even bigger deal breakers for me…just thought I’d call them out here in case anyone else is evaluating this approach.

ESRI Dev Summit Day One…all checked in and ready to go

Day one here in Palm Springs and I’m all checked in and got my “bag-o-swag” for the ESRI Dev Summit and am looking forward to the week’s events.  It’s been good to reconnect with a few colleagues that I haven’t seen in awhile and meet a few new folks.  Having been away from the Geospatial realm for a year or so before landing in my current position, it’s good to come back to the well and drink the kool-aid every once in awhile.  Attended the blog meetup last evening which provided a good opportunity for those of us who are constantly cross posting and tracking back to each other to put names with faces.

Lots of ArcGIS Server goodness on this year’s conference agenda which will be good for me.  I’ll be focusing primarily in the AGS realm; specifically on the SOAP and REST API topics in anticipation of several projects we have on the horizon.  We’ve got some mobile work on the docket as well so I’m encouraged to see a few sessions focusing on that.  The projects I’ve been on of late have been primarily ESRI desktop and Engine based so I’m looking to refine my skills in the web realm and brush up the rusty spots.  I’ll try to post several times over the course of the conference with random thoughts and impressions so stay tuned…

My boss is on the internet…

Yeah, I haven’t been real regular about posting here lately, but we’ve been overrun with conference prep and putting out fires and the blog has taken a back seat. 

Speaking of conferences…here’s a shot of some of my crew at the GITA conference in Seattle. 

http://virtualearth4gov.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!369B39F890CE30C1!779.entry?wa=wsignin1.0

We’re sharing a booth with the VE guys at Microsoft.  Sorta funny to be able to call your sales manager and tell her to tuck her shirt in…

Next week we’re off to the ESRI conference so its a busy travel month for all.  More to follow…

Agile evangelism for my own team

So about once every quarter we try to get our entire geospatial development staff together in the same room for a couple of hours to catch up with everybody.  It’s a “dinner-n-learn” type of thing after hours where we might cover new projects and developments within the company, recognize heroic acts by team members, and one member of the team will give a presentation on new technology or some hot topic that they care about.  Well it was my turn at the pulpit this week and so I worked up a presentation introducing agile software development approaches focusing on Scrum. 

Multi-threading musings

Recently, my team and I have been working on an SOA implementation that uses some relatively “expensive” ESRI COM objects within the services tier.  For example, instantiating an IWorkspace can take a long time, relatively speaking.  Since ArcObjects are COM-based, clearly multi-threading isn’t going to solve all of our problems due to the thread affinity of STA objects, however if there is a long running WCF service that uses these expensive objects, we can create a “pool” of service connections complete with cached objects and have them ready for use by consumers of the service…effectively front-loading the performance hit to the service startup process.

So what we wanted was a managed thread pool…separate from the default thread pool so we’re not stealing resources from the core application…and nobody really relishes the opportunity to build their own thread pool from scratch.  At least I don’t. For info on when not to use the default system thread pool, check out Chris Mullins’ excellent post over here.  Here’s a couple of options we explored in the hopes that someone may find them useful.