Looking back over the Dev Summit

The Esri Developer Summit is over for another year. Now I'm back home what are the key things that I have taken away?

It's the people!

The developer summit gives amazing access to Esri developers and senior technical staff. Its not just about the presentations, the Esri staff are available at the stands throughout the first 4 days, are approachable, interested to help, discuss different approaches and the future direction of the stack.

Why, What, How

Why do we build what we do? Because GIS is a powerful solution to many of the issues that organizations face. It provides a system of record, rich spatial visualization and a way of understanding data through powerful spatial analysis.

What we build is in response to an organizations or user needs. From a simple script that improves productivity, to a complex application that provides custom workflows, we build tools and solutions that meet the requirements while considering the user experience,

How we build depends on the environment, the devices that will be used and how users will use our products. There is a wide range of development options, tools an supported languages. The presentations at the summit provide guidance to making the right choice of tools, APIs and languages for application development.

ArcGIS Pro: If you haven't made the move you should be soon

If you and your users want to make use of the latest features across the platform you need to make the switch to ArcGIS Pro. The next release will close the gap with existing features in desktop while providing many new features. ArcGIS Provides a rich GIS desktop experience, visualization and analysis in 3D and the ability to publish to ArcGIS Enterprise.

Maintenance of the existing desktop suite, ArcMap | ArcCatalog will continue for a reasonable period to support allow existing workflows and tools, however it is unlikely new features will be added into the existing desktop suite.

There is free guidance and training available to make the switch to ArcGIS Pro in Esri Academy or attend one of our courses. For those that are interested in map production and publishing layers I can recommend the Cartography MOOC.

JS API 4.x

We have been use the 4.x version of the JS API for last 3 years on major projects. It has continued to evolve and grow, while bridging the gap with the previous version. The 4.11 version of the API is expected towards the end of March. It will include much richer editing support, new visualization techniques, a geojson layer and more 3D capabilities.

A new ArcGIS Online Map Viewer and Web App Builder will be released later this year built upon the 4.x version of the API.

Vector and Feature Tiles enable a rich user experience

Vector tiles provide performant basemap and operational layers that can be readily styled and customized to meet the need of your application without having to republish a new layer. They have been around for a few years but are now easier to style with the vector tile style editor released as beta last year.

Feature Tiles were also announced a year or so ago, they can be used to provide a rich client side experience and improve performance by bringing a large number of features client side for advanced visualization, analysis and querying.

A little Arcade goes a long way

Arcade is a potable expression language written for GIS that can be used across the ArcGIS Platform. From controlling how features are rendered, manipulating label text to feature validation and calculations, Arcade is an important new tool to add to the toolkit.

Over the next year or so, we will be helping our clients understand and use Arcade.

Python for Productivity

Esri continues to evolve the use of Python across the platform. Jupyter notebooks will be embedded directly inside of upcoming versions of both ArcGIS Enterprise and Pro! This provides users and administrators a rich environment for scripting up workflows, administration and perform analysis.

Jupyter Notebooks are a great environment for pulling in other languages as well, there were presentations using machine learning within notebooks for advanced image analysis.

3D Everywhere

The 3D capabilities of the stack are expanding, on the desktop, mobile and browser. Esri are putting a lot of work building on the current 3D capabilities while continuing to research new functionality such as AR/VR/MR.

Keep Up!

The platform continues to evolve with new features and functionality. The developer summit provides a great way to keep abreast with changes to the stack and understand future direction.

Watch out for presentations and videos from the Dev Summit, these should be made available over the next few weeks on Esri - YouTube.

It's the People! (repeat)

For me the biggest takeaway was the the people. Meeting Esri developers I had previously had email discussions with, making new connections, finding out who to reach out to when there is an issue or a need for guidance. It was also great to talk to others from a range of international clients, service providers, other distributors and colleagues from our offices.

Thanks to all the presenters and organizers of the Dev Summit 2019 for putting on an amazing show. Thanks Esri Australia for sending me to the conference.