Book Image

ArcGIS Blueprints

By : Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler
Book Image

ArcGIS Blueprints

By: Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler

Overview of this book

This book is an immersive guide to take your ArcGIS Desktop application development skills to the next level It starts off by providing detailed description and examples of how to create ArcGIS Desktop Python toolboxes that will serve as containers for many of the applications that you will build. We provide several practical projects that involve building a local area/community map and extracting wildfire data. You will then learn how to build tools that can access data from ArcGIS Server using the ArcGIS REST API. Furthermore, we deal with the integration of additional open source Python libraries into your applications, which will help you chart and graph advanced GUI development; read and write JSON, CSV, and XML format data sources; write outputs to Google Earth Pro, and more. Along the way, you will be introduced to advanced ArcPy Mapping and ArcPy Data Access module techniques and use data-driven Pages to automate the creation of map books. Finally, you will learn advanced techniques to work with video and social media feeds. By the end of the book, you will have your own desktop application without having spent too much time learning sophisticated theory.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ArcGIS Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting to know Plotly


Plotly (plot.ly) will be used to build the graphs and charts that are part of the tools built in this chapter. It's important to understand some fundamental concepts of how Plotly works before getting started.

Plotly is a cloud service specializing in data visualization and statistical analysis. Using Plotly's web-based interface, it is possible to upload data in various formats, including Microsoft Excel and Access, CSV, TSV, Matlab, and spreadsheets from Google Drive. Once imported, the web interface can then be used to create various types of visualization, including bar and pie charts, line graphs, scatter plots, area charts, histograms, box plots, heat maps (not GIS-based heat maps), and others. These visualizations can then be shared with others. The following screenshot depicts the web interface for Plotly:

In addition to the web-based interface, there are several programming languages that can be used to dynamically create visualizations without first uploading...