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Developers Up for a Challenge
2008 ArcGIS Server application contest winners

Moving up from an honorable mention last year to first place this year, John Waterman received $15,000 in the 2008 ArcGIS Server Code Challenge. The winners, chosen by members of the developer community, Esri Developer Network (EDN) subscribers, and registered attendees of the 2008 Esri Developer Summit, were announced during the summit held in Palm Springs, California, March 17–20.

John Waterman's winning application performs geospatial analysis in ArcGIS Server and displays results in either Google Maps (shown) or Microsoft Earth.

The contest was open to all developers, including Esri business partners, who are licensed users of ArcGIS Server 9.2 or current EDN subscribers. Entries were judged on creativity, applicability, and originality.

Waterman's application displays the results of geospatial analysis performed in ArcGIS Server in either Google Maps or Microsoft Earth. Clicking on a parcel generates a simple buffer and displays information about the selected parcel. Waterman, who resides in East Burke, Vermont, is a vice president of geospatial services.

Dave Bouwman received second place and $7,500 for his ArcGIS Server Virtual Tile Server. Designed for use with any map rendering engine, the initial release had one Tile Provider that used the ArcGIS Server SOAP API. Bouwman is a senior software architect from Fort Collins, Colorado.

Loganathan Vijay Sambandhan, a GIS developer from Buffalo, New York, captured third place and a $2,500 prize with his SDE Web Catalog application. With this application, ArcSDE data can be viewed with the online catalog using a Web browser. It was developed using the Ext JS 2.0 framework, a client-side JavaScript framework for building Web applications.

Nianwei Liu, a senior system analyst programmer from Charlotte, North Carolina, received an honorable mention for a JavaScript library that adds an ArcGIS Server cached map service to a Google Maps application using as little as one line of code.

Additional information about the winning applications, as well as the code for them, is available from www.esri.com/codechallengeblog.