Preface

Building Web Applications with ArcGIS is a short book. Short books are hard to write, because I have to condense essential information into less than 150 pages. It is challenging to determine what is essential when you know a lot about a particular subject. The writer has to sacrifice of some content so that they can produce a quality title that readers can really benefit from.

ArcGIS is a suite of software, developed by Esri—Environmental Systems Research Institute. ArcGIS allows its users to view, edit, analyze, and work with geographic data. You can work with geographic data on desktop, web, or mobile. This book tackles the web development side of ArcGIS; it teaches the reader how to build web applications that can interact with ArcGIS.

I am very proud of this title. It is a special book because I have tried a new writing style I haven't used before. This is the first book I have ever written that is purely based on a real-life project. As a reader, you act like a web development company where your clients hand you their requirements. Chapter by chapter you start building the application required by the client gradually: adding functionalities, studying their feasibility, and implementing accordingly. Not only will this teach you the basics of developments for ArcGIS, but it will also relate to your real-life projects as well.

I get bored when I read a book that is cluttered with methods and functions and I have to figure out when and where to use them. Some books give you examples disconnected from reality that you won't ever encounter in your lifetime. This book is different, as each method you use, each library you add, contributes to a requirement requested by a client and it makes sense. You will read and say "yes, this is something my client would definitely request".

Building Web Applications with ArcGIS was designed for web developers who don't necessarily have an experience of ArcGIS. There are going to be three themes running throughout the book. The first theme is design, which is covered in the first two chapters of this book. We will discuss how to interpret requirements, create the interface design, and add basic functionalities such as loading the map. The second theme is development, which is covered in Chapter 3, Querying ArcGIS Services. This is where the reader will add more functionalities such as querying and interacting with the map. The last theme is enrichment and is covered in Chapter 4, Rich Content and Mobile Integration and Chapter 5, Posting Reviews, Ratings, and Photos. It is designed for advanced readers. It will show how to do editing, querying related information, and mobile integration.

All the three themes come under the umbrella of a project called "Bestaurants", where the reader helps a client in Belize, a country on the northeastern coast of Central America. The reader will help improve the Bestaurants project by designing a web interface to visualize the best restaurants, diners, café, and so on in Belize. With each chapter, the Bestaurants' client will ask for new requirements, which the reader will try to implement by the end of the chapter.