This summer (Northern Hemisphere) we will release the RIA controls which are currently under development. The RIA controls are a really exciting part of the product that which act as building blocks to allow the software to grow with your changing requirements. During testing one of the Stratus Engineers has integrated the RIA controls with Google Streetview. This integration is two way -- pan the map and Streetview is updated -- move streetview Connect is updated. Even when the toolbars are minimised there is full bi-directional control. It is a great example of what can be done with the RIA controls.
The controls can be easily integrated with third party API’s from the web or back office. If you have a vendor or system that you want to spatially enable (from Sharepoint to SalesForce.com) the chances are you can do this with the RIA controls. The RIA controls will truely allow for Enterprise mashups. It also demonstrates the decoupling of controls and capabilities in the boxed product to enable them to be dragged around and minimised. There are some great opportunities with for web developers and designers to spatially enable back office systems such as CRMs.
Here is a quick Q&A with the developer Mohin:
Q. Hi Mohin, can you just introduce yourself and your role in the Stratus team?
I am a Senior Software Engineer with the Stratus team, based in London, and I’m a huge fan of web development and all the wonderful things you can do with web 2.0.Q. What gave you the idea for integrating StreetView?
The cool factor! Google had just recently launched Google StreetView in the UK, and there was a lot of talk in the press about it. People were getting excited about having the ability to see a place of interest without actually going there.How great would it be if you were a potential house buyer (or an estate agent) to have a map that showed you which properties were available and what they looked like, all without having to spend time and money in visiting the location yourself.
Q. How long did this integration take?
Altogether this integration took myself and an additional Junior Developer less than three working days. A lot of time was spent studying Google’s API, as neither of us had encountered it before.Q. Where there any challenges you faced?
I am not a traditional GIS person -- in that my education and expertise generally lies in the web development side of things, so a challenge we faced was concerning how to handle the various geographically related side of things, like the various projection systems we were using (Our maps and the Google StreetView use completely different projection systems and units). Thankfully, we used the features available in Stratus RIA to ensure that both API’s were ultimately speaking the same dialect (so to speak). This meant I could focus on making everything look cool
Q. What changes or additions would you make if you had more time?
If I had more time, I would like to have taken further advantage of the StreetView API and the Stratus Map, so that the indicator marker shown on the map would also indicate the direction you were facing in StreetView.It would also have been great to integrate the Stratus Locator control, and have a direct link from each search result that launched StreetView at that specific location. That would mean someone looking for a specific property or street address could simply search and view, without having to interact with a map if they chose not to.
Q. This is a pretty neat example of how the RIA controls can integrate with other API’s do you have any thoughts on other API’s that may be interesting to integrate?
The Dojo toolkit has an exhaustive set of widgets and tools -- some of which I used to produce this app. I’m very sure that with the right set of Dojo widgets and a combination of the RIA controls, you could easily produce an original experience for a user unlike that which they have seen before.I also think there could be potential for integrating an online photo storage application like Flickr with the RIA controls, so you could present/upload photos which are organised geographically -- this could prove to be an interesting challenge.
Finally I have uploaded a video that Mohin produced to demonstrate the integration in action:
Tres Cool!
Mashups have been with us for sometime now, but what we are starting to see here is integration of the GeoWeb with the power of traditional GIS. Here we have Web 2.0 mapping combined with all the power of the underlying PBBI spatial capbilities, secuirty and scalability. As always stay tuned for more information.
