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…