On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 11:13 -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote: > On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Tim Bowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> In general, if you restrict yourself ot reading with 3rd party tools > >> and writing with ESRI tools, or non-ESRI tools working through the SDE > >> API, you should be safe. > >> > > > > So how much of the API is published? My (very limited) understanding is > > that it's not quite simple, but how complex can it really be to > > implement an abstraction layer that allows open source clients to act > > like ArcGIS clients (full read/write)? > > The SDE client API all published, and Geotools in particular has > worked on having a pretty complete support for it. Recent work has > even been looking at supported versioned edits to SDE in Geotools. > Unversioned edits have been supported for some time. The only hidden, > non-technical, downside is that the SDE license manager only allows 5 > non-ESRI clients to connect by default, so you have to be judicious in > what you connect to the server. > > P
Well that maybe opens up the possibilities. Call me a dreamer if you want but what if you could do multi-master between a PostgreSQL/PostGIS and SDE (on anything) using two stage commit with geotools as the basis of a piece of middleware managing the connections. Put update/insert/delete triggers in both SDE/whatever and PostgreSQL/PostGIS that call the "multi-master" middleware and all of a sudden (well, after appropriate non trivial dev work) you've broken the strangle hold of the SDE engine on your enterprise. There would be issues mapping data types (spatial and non-spatial) with different definitions between the systems which would need to be managed. I imagine you can shoot this idea down fairly easily, but at least you'll increase my understanding in doing so :-) Regards, Tim _______________________________________________ postgis-users mailing list [email protected] http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
