Esri, Environmental Systems Research Institute, knew there was a starving market for location-based systems also known geographic information systems (GIS). In 1990s, Esri started working on a product that later became one of the best enterprise solutions for GIS implementations on Windows systems. In 1999, ArcGIS was released. Since then, ArcGIS has become the most used commercial GIS solution. ArcGIS was then renamed ArcGIS for Desktop, and the ArcGIS name was used as a product line instead to carry lots of products under it.
When the Web started to become ubiquitous in early 2000s, Esri adopted the Web by rolling in ArcGIS for Server and gradually ArcGIS functionalities as web services so that it could be supported on multiple platforms including mobile phones.
A decade later when the cloud solutions began to surface, Esri released its Software as a Service (SaaS) solution ArcGIS Online. Designed to simplify the user experience, ArcGIS Online hides all the ArcGIS "contraptions" and technologies to relieve the user from maintaining the hardware and software, leaving the user to do what they do best, mapping. Having everything in the cloud allows users to focus on their work instead of worrying about configurations, spinning up servers and databases, and running optimization checks.
Note
SaaS, a cloud-based software distribution model where all infrastructure, hardware, management software, and applications are hosted in the cloud. Users consume the applications as services without the need to have high-end terminal machines.
Today, Esri is pushing to enhance and enrich the user experience and support multiple platforms by using the ArcGIS Online technology.
In this book, we target one of the core products of the ArcGIS family—ArcGIS for Desktop. By using real-life examples, we will demonstrate the power and flexibility of this 16+ year-old product ArcGIS for Desktop. We are going to use the various tools at our disposable to show how we can extend the functionality of ArcGIS for Desktop.