Ironically the job I just left to pursue research was a GIS development role. I spent a couple of years trying to tame Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. I developed a framework on top of that system. It was C# .Net work as this was the tool of choice for the GIS company I worked for. To be honest all the .Net classes were nothing more than thin wrappers generated by SWIG. It was clear that Autodesk only cared about developing in C++. There were huge problems as the work was trying to migrate a very large and complex system from MapGuide 6.5 to MapGuide enterprise. The problem was that Autodesk had failed to produce any version of MapGuide enterprise which has proved to be especially stable with the very large data sets needed by this system. The system was fairly mission critical and having the server crash periodically was unacceptable. I don't know if the project succeeded in the end. I was writing some load testing tools right at the end to simulate multiple concurrent client computers using the system at once. I was going to build the MapGuide server from the source if needs be and run it in a debugger to see if I could find why it was crashing but I left before I got that far.
Much as I did not enjoy my time in the Microsoft / .Net world I did find GIS very interesting. It still seems a somewhat immature technology and a real challenge to build GIS systems which scale well. I wonder which GIS platform you have been using. I know Esmi is generally considered the best. I did want to try and keep my hand in the GIS space to see if I could look into ways to improve MapGuide Open Source. In the end I have been too busy to have time. Also I was put off by the fact the company I worked for seeming uncomfortable at the prospect of me staying involved in GIS probably in case I did anything which was in competition with them. To work at the company I had to sign a pretty draconian contract to basically say I would never say who the companies customers were nor ever do anything which competed with the company for the rest of my life. As a result I cannot say specifically who the GIS work was for. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
