Thursday, April 30, 2009

View Microsoft Virtual Earth data in Smallworld

I'm very excited to share with you all that the company I work for (iFactor Consulting) earlier this week released Version 1 of the Virtual Earth Connector for Smallworld. You can read the official announcement here.

The VE Connector makes use of Smallworld Core Spatial Technology Spatial Object Manager (SOM) functionality to render landbase and aerial imagery tiles served up by Virtual Earth on your Smallworld map view.

The product page has a demonstration video that shows the functionality. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can get a full version evaluation release here.

It seems like all the big players (ESRI, MapInfo, Oracle Spatial) are going in this direction and now iFactor presents this capability for Smallworld.

I would like to acknowledge Brad Sileo (iFactor VP Business Development by day and mclib master by night) for getting the original product code going. All of the iFactor executives are also master coders!

We used alot of standards-based functionality to get this to work. Let's see how many buzzwords I can remember :) : Source Forge mclib, C#, SOAP, Web Services, SWAF, SOM, ACP.

Incidentally, from the Magik Components Source Forge library, we made good use of:
  • sw_dotnet_acp (thanks to Pedro Miranda for making this code available in mclib!)
  • mclib_package
  • mclib_http_interface (thanks to Tony Sileo and Brad Sileo for contributing to this!)
So, here's a plug for Magik Components: It can greatly help you with your own projects, too!

We are operating under an agile "release early, release often" model. So, once you have the product loaded, you can check for updates regularly in the "About" dialog and download the latest revision as soon as it becomes available.

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