What does the future hold for those who want to develop map applications for ArcGIS Server? After all, the direction of the Internet changes with each new technology, and what is popular today might not be popular tomorrow. The Flex and Silverlight APIs were quite popular at one point, and now they're only being maintained. What does the future hold for ArcGIS Server development with JavaScript?

If the latest releases from ESRI are any indication, JavaScript is still the development language of choice for the web. However, instead of letting users build applications from scratch, the ArcGIS platform has released new features that can jump start application development. Two of them, ArcGIS Online and Web AppBuilder, are based on the ArcGIS JavaScript API. We'll take a look at these technologies, and develop an application using a map created with ArcGIS Online.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics: