Hello all,
Wow, a lively debate on this one. As makers of FME, I thought I should respond to this point here: > Since all ESRI GIS technology is available in component form, there is no > technical reason why you need ArcView/Editor/Info installed either. It's not > ESRI's fault that Safe chose not to integrate a Personal Geodatabase support > component into their translators, but opted to hook into a full ArcGIS > installation instead. Actually, ArcObjects is a collection of components, but you can't just pull some out and distribute them with your application unless you've made arrangements with ESRI first. I'd argue that there is a technical reason why you need ArcView or some such installed - you need to have an valid license for any of those components to work. More recently, with the availability of ArcEngine, I suppose we could explore the option of distributing some part of the ArcObjects runtime with FME, but it would certainly involve additional cost because we'd have to be licensing ArcEngine to do this. It's not likely we will do this. And another update on this topic - at the ESRI UC this summer the file-based Geodatabase was announced, and this is discussed in more detail here: http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer05articles/managing-spatial-data. html. Of particular interest is this sentence: "Like it did with shapefiles, ESRI is providing an open API that will allow anyone to create and use file-based geodatabases." I don't believe any details of this API have been made available yet, but I could be wrong. While I'm writing to the group, the MapInfo 8.0 MUT definitely has support for the .PRJ coordinate systems held in shape files, and can convert between these and MapInfo coordinate system representations quite well. There are some cases where the precision used for some of the parameter values is not the same between both applications, and consequently we've had to resort to manually matching the exact coordinate system strings. If you come across any examples where you bring an ESRI shape file into MapInfo via the MUT and the resulting coordinate system is not recognized in MapInfo (but you think it should be), please let MapInfo support know and we will work with them get another "coordinate system exception" set up. Mathematically, the coordinate system will be correct in mapinfo, but it may be just different enough (just say 45.2333333333 is different than 45.23333333333) that it doesn't match a predefined MapInfo system, so the name for the system will not be recognized in MapInfo. Dale ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dale Lutz Safe Software Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> VP Development Surrey, BC, CANADA phone: (604) 501-9985 http://www.safe.com <http://www.safe.com> fax: (604) 501-9965 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
