GIS In Action - A student's perspective

Written by Val Rudolph

I went to the GIS in Action conference at Portland State University on April 23rd and 24th.  I have come away with the idea that conferences are something you do that can be fun, depending on your attitude that day. And it’s definitely good for you, like eating your vegetables, especially if you’re a student. I’m posting my recollections of the talks I attended. If you understood something differently, please take a moment to tell me.

Attending the conference stretched my wings. I’ve been meaning to apply to Portland State for years, and it finally got me in the door, for an actual academic reason instead of just going there to watch a movie or attend a meeting. I still wish there were a public university, or branch of PSU, on The East Side. That has got to be coming sooner or later!

All the presentations were well “over my head”. But, as an instructor told me recently, every time you attend a lecture, you learn something, even if it’s just getting your brain accustomed to the basic concepts and terminology. Also, the conference is a way to learn what professionals are actually doing out there, how they went through their development process, and whether or not you find the topic interesting.

I was surprised how interested I was in EYEON18 golf course drones service.  They save golf courses money by flying over them a the client’s desired interval during their local growing season, then sending them  true color and NDVI images. So you can see where problems are and catch them quickly. The speaker used the example of a golf course employee using a key to turn off a particular sprinkler head for temporary convenience. If he forgets to turn it back on, the dry spot will soon start to show up in the imaging, and a groundskeeper can go out and correct the error. Each sprinkler head has its own coded number, if not on the ground, then at least in the data.

On one golf course, the imaging showed low-vitality circular areas around each sprinkler head. The problem was that when the sprinklers were installed, they were set in place with sand instead of soil. So the course was able to correct the problem.

David Howes presented at one of the Web Applications talks.  Here’s what I understood:

Mr. Howes holds a PhD in Geomorphology. Geomorphology is the study of landforms and geological processes. GIS imagery plays in important part in this discipline. Mr. Howes, however, told us, “I’m not a mapmaker. I’m a developer”. I think that he is currently engaged as a GIS widget-maker.

I’ve been struggling a bit to firmly grasp the concept of the “widget”. It’s not the same thing as an application. It’s something you use in an application. As he put it, “The functionality becomes available to the user” when you add it into your Web Application.  Another thought that shed some light for me was, “A widget is basically a folder full of files”. I guess I knew that, but I’m so comforted to hear it from a professional!

Here were my main take-aways from the Widget-making presentation:

WebBuilder: He says to go through ArcGis Online. But to make widgets, you need the Developer Edition. To this, download the SDK zip file, unzip to your local drive. Then the server starts. You work in 3 folders concurrently:

• Client folder: Keep it clean. He said something about AutoSaving.
• Server folder: contains code for specific applications
• Project folder: somewhere on Drive, where he designs widgets. “Don’t edit production files directly”, he said. (Why? Where do you edit them, then?)

You have to keep your files synchronized as you work. There is a tool you can use that automates this process, but it sounded to me like he does not use it personally.

General tips: “Start very small”-i.e.: two buttons on a form.

“Develop really clean code so you understand yourself”. In my words, if longer expressions do the same thing as shorter expression, use the shorter ones, and be completely consistent.

“Reuse things as much as you can”

“Make the most of the GeoWeb App community”. In my words, as long as your peers don’t mind you using what they developed, and it works for you, use it as much as you can.

ESRI has a Research and Development center in Beijing?!

Visual Studio code is “absolutely fantastic, especially for JavaScript development”.  (I think that means JavaScript is something you use to make the widgets).

JavaScript is something you use in tandem with HTML for more detailed work?

Be very, very careful when you remove files between the three types of files. This fellow has lost work and knows about this from hard experience. Ouch!

Mind-blower: in HTML, you control color display with numbered codes!

Notepad++ is a coding editor. Oh, that’s why we use it in labs!

F12 you can hit in browser to debug the feature server.

(What is a feature server?) …a “a Map Server is a host that provides map services, and a Feature Server is a host that provides feature services.”-https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/126373/difference-between-feature-server-and-map-server?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa

This is some deep technical stuff, this GIS technology. It takes a lot of work to perform magic!