It's all about the users

This application is designed to be used by roadway project engineers, and not GIS specialists. Thus, the application was designed to minimize "GIS-ness" and maximize the "road-engineer-ness". This was done by designing the application to follow the end user's mental model of their workflow. The application interfaces do not have any GIS specific language on them - instead we use the language the end users expect to see.

Performance

Like any application, performance is critical. One issue users had with the previous application was that it was slow, so every effort was made to create a responsive application. Part of this is acheived by simply leveraging Ajax technologies, which allow parts of the page to be updated. Utilizing low-level ArcObjects to for interactions with the linear referencing system provides sub-second response time for most operations.

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Design Phase

This application is designed to be used by roadway project engineers, and not GIS specialists. Thus, the application was designed to minimize "GIS-ness" and maximize the "road-engineer-ness". This was done by designing the application to follow the end user's mental model of their workflow. The application interfaces do not have any GIS specific language on them - instead we use the language the end users expect to see.

Agile Development

Through the development process, the team released the software to the client every two weeks. This transparency during development ensured that both the team and our clients knew exactly what was being built, and that it was meeting the actual needs of the users.

Deployment & Acceptance Testing

By designing the application as a set of loosely coupled services, based on solid design patterns, the deployment was very smooth. Deploying the web application was a simple copy of the code over to the host server. The ArcGIS Server extensions were packages into an installer that takes a few seconds to run. After some very minor configuration, the system was operational on the client's hardware.

Acceptance testing of this system was very smooth - less than 10 actual "defects" were reported. As the users worked with real data in the system, some modifications to the workflow were deemed necessary, and rapidly deployed.

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ASP.NET Model View Controller

The ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) framework is designed from the ground up to address two requirements for Web 2.0 application: compatibility with Ajax style development, and the ability to leverage unit testing througought the application.

Open Layers

OpenLayers is an open source javascript map canvas that supports numerous OGC and community standards. Using this toolkit enabled the team to rapidly deploy WMS based maps, along with strong support for client-side geometry editing. Although this applicaion is very streamlined, it still requires that the user move end-points. Support for GeoJSON greatly streamlined this aspect of the system

ArcGIS Server

The application itself involves interrogation of a linear referencing system on a state-wide road network. While not natively exposed through the SOAP or .NET API's, ArcGIS Server's flexibility enabled the team to create high-performance server-side routines which were then exposed via web services. These services were consumed by the ASP.NET MVC application, which inturn exposed these functions to the application as JSON web services. The result is an extremely high-performance application.