An Ordinary Geo Web Developer’s Blog

It has been a very long time (almost a year) since I wrote a blog post.

It was a great year both in private and work life. First off all, I got married and this is the greatest thing in my life. It was a busy period to do a wedding ceremony but it was worth it. I would like to thank God from here to join me and my wife together 🙂

Anyway, lets come to main topic which interests this blog : my work life. It was also a good year for my development side.

My development side started to move back to Open Source projects again after an “ESRI” period. Don’t get me understand wrong, ESRI has a great products both on desktop and server side and we are still using ESRI products in our environment, but the license costs are getting more and more even for large organisations like us.

There is also a Google Maps side for this story. I’ve been using Google Maps since it has an API and I’m also a “Qualified Developer for Google Maps JS API”, but the announcement of Google that Google Maps is no more free makes us to think about like other developers or companies. Google Maps has still good map coverage than Bing Maps or OSM, but we had to start looking for the alternatives. We are still using Google Maps JS APIs in our products, but we are thinking more than ever to shift from the API.

Last part of my development life is the Mobile. Mobile is getting more important and we don’t want to get behind from the technology. Most of our managers got an iPad and we started to build apps for mobile, especially for iOS. Some of them may be remember that I have one native and one web app for mobile, which are iExtMap and ExtMap Touch, respectively. I know some people expect to update these products, but I can’t find any time to update them. Hope I can find time this year to update them 🙂

I wrote a summary about 2011 and I just want to finish my post with the popular geo products I’ve used in 2011. I’ll also write about them if I find time.

Wish you all a good year 😉

Geo Products I used in 2011
Desktop :
– ESRI ArcMap (I can’t remember the new name) with Arc2Earth pluging :
Still great at working and symbolizing the data. Arc2Earth is a also a great product to export tiles and GeoJson to our web products.
– QGIS :
Works great with PostGIS to import/export data

Server Side :
– Oracle Spatial (as DB) :
Nothing to say about it, it’s still the best option in Enterprise level in Turkey due to support
– PostGIS (as DB) :
It is my new favorite to work with easily, but the support in Turkey is not good. So we have confusion to switch over in enterprise level.
– ArcGIS Server :
It is the complete product that you can do everything, but licensing is very expensive in Turkey if you want to make a load-balances structure with 6-10 machines.
– Tilemill (can be in desktop side too) :
This is my new favorite tool used for export tiles due to its UTFGrid support. MBTiles is also a great spec from DevelopmentSeed. Thanks a lot for these GREAT TOOLS, hope 2012 will be a great year for you.

API Side :
– Google Maps JS API v3 :
Still the king of APIs due to its easy use and documentation. Integration with Fusion Tables is a great plus the API.
– Leaflet :
This is also my new favorite with TileMill. The compactness and performance is killing me. I would also want to thank CloudMade to make this available.
– OpenLayers :
This was my old favorite. It has support for almost any thing in GIS but this also make it very slow library if you compare it with Google Maps API or Leaflet.
– ESRI JS API :
I’m very new to this API, but I have to be familiar with it 🙂 One thing is annoying that the usage of DOJO Toolkit with the API.

Google announced that Maps Data API will be closed next year and they offer a cool replacement : Fusion Tables

Fusion Tables have support for spatial entities but there was a luck of spatial function until yesterday. They announced spatial queries are supported at Fusion Tables.

As far as I see, there are two new functions which are ST_INTERSECTS and ST_DISTANCE. This is a good news that developers can use Fusion Tables instead of Spatial Databases at some point.

Hope they will add more spatial functions to Fusion Tables.

3-4 months ago  I applied for the “Google Qualified JavaScript Maps Developer” program and then joined the military. But a month ago, I got a message from Google to get qualified 🙂 The program is working on Moodle and there are 4 parts to get points.  The details are as follows : http://code.google.com/intl/tr-TR/qualify/faq.html

There are also other fields at “Qualified Developer Program” such as Geo 3D or KML.  The main idea of the program is to show your developer skills but not in ordinary way. Other programs usually need to take an exam and pass it, but Google follow a different way to qualify.  You get points from “Application Development” (1000 pt), “Community Participation” (1000 pt),  “References” (1000 pt) and “Qualification Exam” (2000 pt). As it is seen, there are 5000 points and you must get 3000 points at least to get qualified. So that, if you are an active developer you can get qualified without taking the exam.

Anyway, last week I took the exam, get my missing points and get qualified as a “JS Maps API Developer” 🙂 You can see all the qualified developers at http://code.google.com/intl/tr-TR/qualify/directory.html By the way, I’m the first “Google Qualified Javascript Maps Developer” in Turkey 😀 and hope to see other Turks as a Maps Developer.