John Waterman, first place

The winners of the ArcGIS Server Code Challenge were announced at the 2008 Esri Developer Summit in Palm Springs, California, on March 15. The ArcGIS Server Code Challenge is an annual competition that invites developers to submit their own ArcGIS Server scripts to be reviewed by GIS professionals. The developer community, Esri Developer Network (EDN) subscribers, and registered attendees of the 2008 Developer Summit voted for the top three samples that best represented creativity, applicability, and originality.

Says first-place winner John Waterman, vice president of Geospatial Solutions at GCS Research, "A lot of our customers at GCS Research ask us how to build custom applications." Waterman, who received honorable mention at last year's ArcGIS Server Code Challenge, won $15,000 for his first-place submission.

Dave Bouwman, second place

Coming in at second place and the winner of $7,500 was Dave Bouwman, senior software architect at Data Transfer Solutions in Fort Collins, Colorado. Bouwman's ArcGIS Virtual Earth Tile Server code sample uses ArcGIS Server to create map tiles that can be brought into Microsoft Virtual Earth. Bouwman explains, "The application increases performance by using a dynamic caching process that kicks back images already contained in the cache."

Vijay Sambandhan, third place

Third-place winner of $2,500 was Vijay Sambandhan, a GIS developer from Bergmann Associates in Buffalo, New York. His SDE WEB Catalog code was written to display ArcSDE data in a Web browser, bypassing the need to open a separate application. He says, "I used open-source JavaScript libraries to emulate ArcCatalog inside the Web browser so that users don't have to open another program to view their data and metadata."

This year's honorable mention winner is Nianwei Liu, a senior system analyst for the City of Charlotte, North Carolina. Liu's sample code makes it possible to include terabytes of spatial information from ArcGIS Online. "By combining the dynamic caching, spatial querying, and geoprocessing capabilities of ArcGIS Server," says Liu, "there are endless opportunities to build powerful yet easy-to-use geospatial analysis tools and make them accessible over the Web."

More Information

Stay posted to www.esri.com for future code challenge announcements.