Check out the link on google.ca for Chrome. Now just imagine getting a link from google.com….

All the effort that Google has put into Chrome, then I find this funny screen capture opportunity.

Come on, I just wanted to get access to my bookmarks that are stored in the magical Google Bookmarks thingy..

This morning I sat in on the Introduction to Topobase API class at Autodesk University presented by Dongjin Xing.  I've made an effort to attend Dongjin's classes every year for the past several years.  He is a good presenter, and has a damn good handle on things.  If you are a developer type, I recommend you consider his courses.  This one was no exception.

I've heard people talking about Topobase for quite some time.  I've heard good, and I've heard bad.  Today I got my first look at the product.  Topobase is a server product that works with Oracle spatial to facilitate the creation, editing and sharing of spatial data in Oracle.  A client is provided with a full API and users can access data using AutoCAD Map or a web client based on Mapguide Enterprise.

The design of Topobase looks to be well tiered.  Using ADO.NET and OraDirect.net it also supports connection pooling.  They provide a neat VB.NET scripting interface that helps build simple workflows, and data validation rules.

All in all, everything they are putting forward looks quite cool.  Visual studio templates to build Topobase plugins that can be loaded right into the Topobase UI.  It could become a very cool starting point for developers/consultants to start building tools to work on data. But there are a few problems...

Topobase is by no means a new product.  It's several revisions in since Autodesk aquired it - but it still seems to have some performance problem.  During the presentation this morning, Topobase took over a minute to load.  Once loaded, it took over a minute to load and render a small dataset.  Now, Oracle/Topobase and AutoCAD Map were running within a virtual machine, running on a notebook.  Even still - that's slow.

Now, I'm no Autodesk insider.  I'm also not a business expert (but I have been learning a thing or two about it over the years).  History does tend to repeat itself.  I look back at GIS Design Server and Vision.  Like Topobase, both of these products were acquired by Autodesk.  Like Topobase, these products were 'Enterprise Data Store' type things.  Both these products are now "not actively promoted", and customers are encouraged to migrate to Topobase.  With the Autodesk stock price down - they are going to trim fat.  The Autodesk reseller channel for the most part does not have the skills to use, support, or sell this tool - and it really is a developer/consultant tool.   My fear about Topobase is that if I were to invest the time in learning and developing for Topobase, Autodesk will "retire" the product.  Then that invested time is wasted, but more importantly the relationship with my customers is damaged by leaving them stranded up s**t creek with yet another dead 'Enterprise Data Store' thing.

It's a catch 22.  So its not unreasonable to think that Autodesk needs developers like us to adopt, promote, and sell Topobase to help keep it alive.  I'm interested in hearing your opinions on this subject...

Well day 4 in Las Vegas for Autodesk University.  Took my first weekend off in a long long time =).  Monday was the ADN Developer Day, sadly its all NDA goodness and I really don't wanna get a call from the Autodesk lawyers =).

This morning I attended the SQL Server 2008 with AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide (GS100-3) presented by Orest Halustchak (Technical Architect at Autodesk) and Isaac Kunen (Senior Program Manager at Microsoft).   First it was really nice to bring in the brains from Microsoft for a presentation on SQL server.

This class was especially interesting to me, as I have not yet made time to look at SQL server 2008 in great depths.  It looks like Microsoft done a pretty good job at their first spatial offering.  I'm always hesitant to jump in heads first to a first release.  Hey I waited until Mapguide Enterprise 2009 before I even really considered writing any code for it.  If you are new to spatial databases, or you have a more basic need (no need for more advanced Linear Referencing System or network tracing functionality) SQL server might be right for you.  If you already have SQL server experience, the learning curve going to SQL 2008 spatial is going to be a lot less nasty than starting with Oracle Spatial.

The spatial functionality is available all versions of SQL server, except for the compact edition.  Yes, even the free Express version contains the spatial engine.  This is good news.  Often times when Oracle comes up (even the express edition), people get scared.  Oracle has a scary, difficult stigma associated with.  Spatial abilities with SQL server Express could be very helpful in getting a spatial engine into smaller shops.

Microsoft is pretty good with the small details.  One of the cool features of SQL 2008 is the ability to view the spatial data right in SQL Management Studio.  Note this doesn't seem to be available in the Express edition of Management Studio. 

AutoCAD Map and Mapguide seem to work pretty well with SQL 2008.  I plan to load some larger data sets into SQL 2008 in the coming weeks to see how it performs in comparison to Oracle spatial.

Here is a tip for planning for AU.  Consider budgeting to eat outside of the Autodesk provided buffets.  =)

I’m on the plane heading to Las Vegas. The time has come for another Autodesk University. Yay for my annual “vacation”. This trip is going to be packed full of meetings, classes, and World of Warcraft =). To all my devoted readers, I must apologize for the one month delay in posts. I’ll be working on getting everyone up to speed on what has been going on in the past month here. I hope to post once per day on cool and awesome things at AU. Hopefully there is something cool and awesome at least once per day.

I also have to add that bringing small children on airplanes is cruel, the US Airways coffee sucks, but the orange juice is great =)

So, finally I got fed up with working from a 32 bit XP virtual machine and spent a little more time on this issue.  I’ve managed to get my Vista Ultimate a la x64 mostly working.  Where I went wrong the last time (aside from trying to figure this out in the middle of the night in a shitty mood because I had spent so much time head banging with a wall) was using the 64 bit client. 

The correct path to Oracle happiness in my case was the 11g client.  It works great with my 10.2 server.  The important bit in was to use the 32 bit install rather than the 64 bit install.  One of my primary tools for accessing Oracle is Toad for Oracle 9.x.  Quest Software states that Toad for Oracle 9.6 is the first version to really support the 11g client.  However, it does NOT support the x64 client.

So the last time I tried to solve this, after a long day, and a fun night of head banging with a wall – when I tried the 11g client, I used x64 cbuild – and saw that Toad wouldn’t work, I threw a little hissyfit and went to bed.  Long story short, installing both the 32bit 11g client and 11g ODAC/ODP seems to have done the trick.  Now – there is one important little piece o’ information that you will need to know.  Though I have not confirmed this, I suspect that x64 applications will not be able to use the driver. 

That said, from a development point of view you will need to set IIS to run at 32 bit.  On IIS 5.x/6.x this is a server wide setting from a dos window:

               1: cscript
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64
1

               2: %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe
-i

If you’re running Vista or Server 2008 with IIS7, you have things a little better.  You can configure each application pool to run as 32 or 64 bit.  For winform development, change the compile properties of the project to set the target platform to be x86.

I’m really glad that’s over…but I still want a proper x64 ODAC.  Come on Oracle .. =)

Yay.  Autodesk today released an update for both the Mapguide Enterprise Web Tier, Server and Studio.  This release should catch Enterprise up a little more closely to the Open Source edition.  A PDF with containing some of the changes can be found here.  Check out the updates.  Some of these updates are pretty critical (ie. the FireFox 3 takes out your Mapguide server).  Looks like many performances updates have made it in also.

Thanks Autodesk! =)

ORA-13226: Interface not supported without a spatial index.

I hate that error.  Someone would give me a new Oracle dump file.  I’d try to view the spatial data and boom - ORA-13226.  If I was lucky, there was only a couple of tables in it.  Chances are, there were hundreds of tables in it.  Sometimes I’d need to add the reference to the USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA view, sometimes I wouldn’t.   Sometimes the index would already exist and just need to be rebuilt.

Regardless of the scenario, it would often involve a lot of SQL – or messing around to try and remember the SQL.  Every time this would pop up I would think to myself, “I really should write an app…”.  Well I finally did.

So, here is my announcement.  The RADE Spatial Indexer is just about ready for beta.  Initially this app does three things.

• It will list tables and views with geometry columns that are not part of the USER_SDO_GEOM_META data view and help you add them.
• It will list spatial tables without indexes and help you create them.
• It will list spatial tables with indexes and help you re-index them.

No more exporting queries to text files and using a macro to edit them to build your SQL for rebuilding those indexes.  I’ve tried to add some nice friendly helpers, such as a button that will suggest the spatial metadata settings for a table based on the existing meta data records.  The ability to mass create or rebuild indexes is also been a fantastic helper.

I’m recruiting brave individuals for a small closed beta program that will begin in about two weeks.  If you are interested in being a tester please e-mail indexer (at) webrade.com and let me know.  Alternately you can contact me with the contact me link on the blog here  Remember, this is a beta – so I really do not suggest you run this on a production, or important server.  That said, I have been using it in various states on my own ‘production’ development Oracle server.

As an incentive for helping me out.  If you submit feedback (be it a bug report or feature request) – I will set you up with a free license once we release 1.0.  I know you’re hooked and want to sign up.  I know it.  Just in case you need a little more, here is a few screen caps..

Look at how easy it could be to define metadata.  Click the suggest button and it will iterate through the metadata settings for other spatial tables in the schema.  Once you have one row defined, use the sync button to set all rows to the same values.  Click process and its done.

Within seconds, have hundreds of spatial indexes being re-created…Creating new indexes is almost as easy.

I have enough junk running on my development machine.  In an effort to try and keep my workstation speedy - I don't install any unnecessary services (Oracle server, Mapguide Server etc) on this machine.  In a larger development environment, running multiple servers on local development machines has a few other less than desirable results.  For example licensing issues and costs could increase, data management can become more complex, and just managing the extra services on N machines could cause a lot more work for your already overworked IT guy.

So instead I have centralized my server resources into a nice VM setup running on my beefy Dell server.  Now, regardless of which machine I use to develop I can still access the same data sets.  This is especially nice when traveling.  Specifically Mapguide Server and web tier are installed on my development web server.  When coding, I will either use my local IIS or the built in Visual Studio web server.  This poses one problem when working with Mapguide.  Referencing the web tier on the shared server from another web server will result in cross site scripting (XSS) errors.  Basically, javascript on one web server cannot access javascript code on another web server, which under most circumstances is a good thing.  When trying to develop using the Mapguide Web API on a central Mapguide server this poses a problem as the web tier API is wholly contained within the virtual directory on another server.  Gotta love when 'security' jumps up bites us in the behind.

The simple solution to this problem is to install the Mapguide web tier on every development machine.  This will require that each development machine have a web server installed, but chances are that is already the case.  When installing the web tier be sure to have the IP address of the Mapguide server handy as it will needed during the install.  Once the web tier is running locally, reference the local web tier in your URLs and the cross site scripting vulnerabilities go away!  If you're running the 64 Bit version of Vista on your development machine, check out my post installing the web tier on Vista x64

Over the years, this problem has sporadically appeared (probably once or twice a year).  In the Mapguide 6.5 server admin when creating a new data source the Autodesk Spatial Data Provider for Oracle Spatial doesn't appear as an option.  Every time this comes up I end up wracking my brain to remember what the solution is.  I know I've dealt with this many times - but I cannot remember the details.  Usually it's occurring on a customer's production server which is not a place I like to mess around.  This time, it was my development server - let the messing around begin!

In a nutshell this is a result of installing Mapguide server before the Oracle client is installed on the server.  The solution is to do a repair install of Mapguide Server (or a re-install if you prefer) once the Oracle client is installed.  Hopefully next year when this comes up again - writing this down will help me remember.  Worst case Google might pick this up and I'll find my own post when I search for it...

Another day, another fun error message.  Thanks to all the fun I've been having with Oracle X64 on Vista - I've given up and created a new virtual machine with XP Pro to run Visual Studio in.   So I grab the latest revision from source control and load the solution in Visual Studio.  Boom.  Sytem.Runtime.InteropServices.ComException.  That's it. No more details.  This is one of those errors where it could be just about anything.  A quick search on the topic gives way too many results.

So I'm going to add one more search result on this error message.  After much muckery - I've resolved my instance of the problem.  The background is simple.  I have an ASP.NET web application with a few DLL projects and a deployment project.  As stated, I've created a new install of Windows XP.  First ensure that you have the 2008 Web Deployment Project add-on installed.  That can also cause this error (in some cases).

The key thing in this case was the lack of IIS on the machine.  On my primary development machine (the one where Oracle is a massive pain) I do have IIS installed, and the last time I ran this project from that machine - Oracle was working OK with the data access hack.  But apparently something has changed on that box and now I'm getting the evil "Oracle client and networking components were not found." error.  So I gave up.

First obvious work around is to install IIS.  I'm sick of messing around today, and just want to work.  So the quicker solution is to enable the built in development web server.  This can be accomplished by right clicking the unloaded project in the Visual Studio solution explorer and choosing "Edit <projectname.whateverlanguateyouuseproj>".  This will bring up the XML view of the project.  Find the ProjectExtensions section of the config and change UseIIS to be False.  Setting this up could also prevent problems when you have a larger, or more dynamic team accessing the project.

               1:
              <
              ProjectExtensions
              >
            

               2:
              <
              VisualStudio
              >
            

               3:
              <
              FlavorProperties
              GUID
              ="{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21}"
              >
            

               4:
              <
              WebProjectProperties
              >
            

               5:
              <
              UseIIS
              >False</UseIIS>

               6:
              <
              AutoAssignPort
              >False</AutoAssignPort>

               7:
              <
              DevelopmentServerPort
              >4088</DevelopmentServerPort>

               8:
              <
              DevelopmentServerVPath
              >/webrade</DevelopmentServerVPath>

               9:
              <
              IISUrl
              >http://localhost/WebRADE32</IISUrl>

               10:
              <
              NTLMAuthentication
              >False</NTLMAuthentication>

               11:
              <
              UseCustomServer
              >False</UseCustomServer>

               12:
              <
              CustomServerUrl
              >
            

               13:
              </
              CustomServerUrl
              >
            

               14:
              <
              SaveServerSettingsInUserFile
              >False</SaveServerSettingsInUserFile>

               15:
              </
              WebProjectProperties
              >
            

               16:
              </
              FlavorProperties
              >
            

               17:
              </
              VisualStudio
              >
            

               18:
              </
              ProjectExtensions
              >
            

Reload the project, and it should load now.

P.S. Oracle, please please please release something for Vista x64 and ODAC/ODP.  Even an alpha.  I promise I will test on an x86 machine before I release..

Javascript compression is something I had on my list for the next major release of RADE.  RADE is not quite ready for this step yet, so I thought I would give it a shot on Mapguide Enterprise and see what kind of results it would yield.  For a small site or an internal site this will probably not yield significant benefits.  However if you run a large public site javascript compression could squeeze out some more performance as well as save you on bandwidth costs.  Yahoo has a good article on performance and the "empty cache".

I did some brief looking around and word on the internets is that the YUI compressor is one of the better compressors out there.  The YUI compressor is an open source java applet.   This *should* work with Mapguide Open, heck this might even be done already in MGOS - but I am only using Enterprise so I cannot confirm, deny, or test this.  

Some of the key things the compressor will do:

1. remove all comments
2. remove all white space and line breaks
3. rename all local variables and parameters to single characters

The YUI compressor should not alter variable values or your logic in any way.

To use the YUI compressor you will need to have Java installed.  Note that if you have the Oracle client installed, you probably have Java already  Once you have Java, you can download a copy of the YUI compressor (I'm going to start referring to it as the YC now...).  If you don't feel like downloading Java and the YC - I've attached the processed files at the bottom of this post.

Lets first look at the javascript shipped with Mapguide Enterprise.  If you browse to your web server extension viewer files (the default location is C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2009\WebServerExtensions\www\viewerfiles I believe) you will see ten javascript files.  If you choose to process these files on your own please back them up first.  Don't blame me if you don't backup your files and something goes wrong =).

Before YC:

Using the YC is simple:

               1: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\browserdetect.js
browserdetect.js

Update the paths to Java and the YC as per your environment.  Using the handy dir /B *.js > go.bat I created a batch file of all the javascript files in the viewerfiles folder.  Be sure to run this from a dos window in the viewerfiles folder, or update the paths.  You will also need to create the comp folder in viewerfiles.   Quick cut and pasting created the following batch file:

               1: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\browserdetect.js
browserdetect.js

               2: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\contextmenu.js
contextmenu.js

               3: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\digitize.js
digitize.js

               4: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\hashtable.js
hashtable.js

               5: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\initdwfctrl.js
initdwfctrl.js

               6: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\legend.js
legend.js

               7: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\numfmt.js
numfmt.js

               8: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\pngfix_map.js
pngfix_map.js

               9: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\sarissa.js
sarissa.js

               10: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe
-jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\wz_jsgraphics.js
wz_jsgraphics.js

(*Sorry about the overlap.  I'm working on a new layout and am addressing that in there)

Running that output all of the compressed of the files down somewhat, to pretty significantly.

A quick comparison of one of the function calls:

               1:
              function MenuData(menuName,
arrowHeight, scrollInc, scrollDelay, minSize, iconScrollUp, iconScrollUpDisabled,
iconScrollDown, iconScrollDownDisabled, owner, withIFrame, bkColor)

               2:
              function MenuData(F,H,I,K,E,G,D,J,A,C,B,L)

As you can see - the savings can be significant.

I'm not using the Fusion viewer yet so I did not process those files, but I did check some of the JS in there and each script file had a huge header comment.  It looks like Fusion could also benefit from some compression action.  Please note, I've been running my web tier using this script for a day or two.  I've not run any serious testing on this code - so try this at your own risk.  You did make that backup I suggested, right?  That said, I have not personally experienced any problems yet.  Also, should you compress your viewerfiles and have problems be sure to try your backups.  Especially before calling your dealer or Autodesk for help. (sorry product support and ADN guys.  Please don't hate me =] ).

Enjoy!