ArcIMS tutorial (1)

Chapter 1 Overview of ArcIMS

 

Chapter overview

This book will introduce you to ArcIMS, a tool that combines the creation and maintenance of Internet websites based on geographical information. This topic will allow you to master ArcIMS in an all-round and rapid manner through lectures, instructor demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, including an in-depth understanding of the composition of ArcIMS software packages, design interactive drawing applications, and discuss the architecture of ArcIMS software and hardware.

Each part of this lesson will start with a series of questions. These questions are raised to ease your appetite, so that you can learn about the content of the next course and exercise in advance. You don't have to worry about answering these questions at the beginning. You just need to have an impression in your mind. After completing this chapter and completing the exercises, you can think about and answer these questions, and compare your answers with the answers in the appendix of this book. At that time, you will be more familiar with the content and terminology in this chapter.

The first chapter of this book is an overview of ArcIMS. In this chapter, you will learn the relationship between ArcIMS and other ESRI Internet solutions, the Internet application examples of ArcIMS products, and a brief introduction to ArcIMS.

 

GIS and Internet

Internet is the greatest communication revolution since the invention of print. Indeed, since its birth, the Internet has evolved from a simple digital data transmission method to a huge industry in just ten years. Today, the Internet is connected to thousands of people around the world and has become an important part of people's daily life.

The Internet also provides an excellent forum for analyzing and solving geographical problems. With the Internet, people can easily and quickly obtain and transmit geographic data in any corner of the earth. ArcIMS emphasizes the release of geographic data on the Internet. Just as you can get data from other websites. Because Geographic Data has great freedom and mobility on the internet, it can finally solve many practical problems in many fields, such as city management, business management, social and environmental planning, and industrial layout.

 

What is ArcIMS?

ArcIMS provides powerful GIS functions in a simple framework. It supports transmitting image or vector data through element streams. This changes the way users interact with the Internet and access geographical data.

ArcIMS includes the following features:

1. Easy-to-use installation, application and management wizard and templates;

2. Powerful clients that support stream transmission of vector data;

3. integrate local data with network data in the Internet desktop browser;

4. Server Architecture flexibility;

5. High-quality Map Symbol display.

ArcIMS 3.0 is developed from other Internet Solutions of ESRI. It absorbs the strengths of these products, such as the simplicity of ArcView IMS and the robustness of its functions, the flexibility and programmability of mapobjests IMS, the openness of the GIS Data Server framework. These products are described in detail in the following sections.

 

 

Introduction to ArcView IMS

ArcView IMS is an extension module that provides maps over the Internet or Intranet through servers. With ArcView IMS, you can use ArcView without the framework to plot and provide GIS applications on the Internet.

To quickly publish data online, ArcView IMS contains a Java Applet Installation Wizard, mapcafe. Create a custom HTML page where mapcafe resides for map customization. Mapcafe provides you with drawing tools through the network, which allow you to perform operations such as roaming, scaling, Recognizing Map feature attributes, locating, and creating hot zone connections. The Web browser transparently downloads Java applets on the web page, so you don't have to worry about using these graphics tools.

There are many types of spatial data used to create interactive maps online, including ArcView GIS shapefiles, ArcInfo coverage, SDE layers, and CAD files such as DWG, DXF, and dgn. Other files that can be used include image data such as TIFF files, JPEG files, lan files and BIL files, database files (access, dBase, and other ODBC-related database files) or graphical files.

ArcView IMS allows you to use the powerful drawing interface of ArcView GIS to create maps. The map provided on the Internet is actually the "virtual view" of the map displayed in the ArcView window ". Therefore, most functions of ArcView GIS, such as topic symbol display, buffer analysis, and spatial analysis, are still applicable to ArcView IMS.

 

Introduction to MapObjects IMS

 

Mo (MapObjects) IMS is a component set used to manage customer requests, send requests to the Web server ing program, and transmit the results map and data to the client over the network. Mo IMS is part of the Internet solution toolbox of MapObjects. This toolkit consists of three parts: MapObjects IMS, MapObjects, and arcexplorer.

Of course, to make full use of the potential of MapObjects IMS, you must fully understand MapObjects. MapObjects is a set of embedded graphics and Geographic Information System Components launched by ESRI. It provides 45 programmable ActiveX automation objects that can be inserted into Visual Basic, visual c ++ supports calls in industrial standard Windows development environments.

Mo lab IMS uses a popular three-tier architecture to run distributed applications. For Client browsers, you must have the ability to access the mo IMS endpoints (such as arcexplorer, HTML, Java, and actives). Microsoft's Ie already provides acrexplorer for Active X for use.

For programmers, the key to using MapObjects IMS is their programming capabilities. For non-programmers, ArcIMS provides a simple and easy-to-use interface to quickly create powerful websites.

 

Routemap IMS

Routemap IMS is the youngest member of the ESRI software family to address online plotting. It is not only inexpensive, but can also run independently, websites of certain organizations can provide functions such as plotting, distribution of sales points, and path search.

From the above website, we can see that routemap IMS provides special functions. The software contains Street and land mark data from Continental America. With this data, program developers can quickly make the website functional. Routemap IMS is relatively small, so its custom elasticity is not as good as that of other ESRI online solution products. However, routemap IMS offers more options than other "fat" IMS products.

For more detailed information about routemap IMS technology, you can query it on the ESRI website.

 

 

GIS data server

When a website needs to respond to a large number of requests or applications with some special features, it may need support from the GIS data server. GIS data server is a non-out-of-the-box solution.

Realtor and visa.com are two high-capacity websites that require dedicated and effective solutions. For example, realtor.com only requires an Internet user to input data about the house he wants to purchase to find the corresponding standard house. Another example is visa.com. If a customer fills in an address, the website can find all the ATMs closest to the given distance. These are not complex problems that other IMs solutions can solve. In these examples, GIS data server technology can be used to manage and maintain such applications with high data communication volumes.

 

 

Why do we need ARCIMS technology?

As shown in the preceding example, ESRI provides different Online drawing solutions. As a new generation of Internet software, ArcIMS integrates these IMs products, which are easy to use and powerful.

ArcIMS has a mature customer/server architecture that allows direct customization of each layer. For example, a client user can create a specific Internet application by customizing HTML, JavaScript, or calling an open object model. On the server side, ArcIMS provides projection and feature-based features. Middleware can be customized using ASP and ColdFusion technologies to expand your website.

Other important features of ArcIMS include the Support for element data stream, data integration from different sources, and the use of some auxiliary tools. Through the element data stream method, ArcIMS not only can transmit image data to the client, but also can transmit vector data. It also allows some functions beyond the plotting, such as space superposition of data, geographic analysis. The most important thing is that, through the element data stream, you can not only access remote data through the network, but also use data on your local machine. Auxiliary Tools include the client's element editing tool-editnotes and the tool for sharing some special geographic information-mapnotes.

Unlike other esri ims products, ArcIMS runs as an NT Service, which allows many existing users to access the website effectively.

Architecture of ArcIMS

ArcIMS contains many parts, each of which plays an important role in the customer/Server structure. In short, ArcIMS has three layers.

The first layer is the client or user terminal in the wide area or LAN. It is a computer or application that is directly or indirectly connected to the server. It establishes communication with the server through HTTP or TCP/IP protocol.

The second layer is called middleware. Middleware can be compared to a "broker" that transmits requests received, sent, and responded between the client and the server. It manages data between the client and the server, to achieve the best efficiency and transmission speed.

The third layer is the server. The ArcIMS space server can be regarded as a software server to manage and process geographic data that needs to be published on the Internet. The request for geographic data is sent to the server. The server proxy executes the request for the required data and generates an image or element map for query, geographical encoding, and element extraction. Finally, the response is returned to the client through middleware.

 

 

Create an ArcIMS website

To put it simply, creating an ArcIMS website requires three steps:

1. Use author to generate a map based on the data needed. Author allows you to use multiple geographic layers at the same time, select the Map Symbol and structure, and finally output the. Axl text file ..

2. After the Axl file is created, it must be registered in the middleware. This process is called "starting the map service ". Administrator is an application that allows the server to communicate with the middle.

3. Once the map service is created and started with the Administrator, you can design the website for release. Throughout the process, the designer guides you through the Wizard to Create HTML pages and related support files.

 

 

ArcIMS Composition

If you perform a typical installation, the application group shown in will appear when you run ArcIMS. The following four pages describe the functions of these programs in arcims3.0.

 

 

Author

The establishment of the ArcIMS website can be implemented using three main programs. The first program to be used is author. It allows website developers to determine which data is used and how the data is displayed. Author allows users to define the content of the map posted on the WWW website.

In a Directory window, you can find the data layer to be released online, these data are shapefiles, image data, or SDE layers of ArcView (which will be detailed later ). Once the data is determined, the website programmer can define the Layer Sequence and display mode. For example, you can change a "Lake" layer to fill the blue multilateral line, the dark blue outer frame line, and the notes with orange, and Arial fonts.

You can use author to change the display of polygon, points, lines, and text labels based on your requirements. You can also set the display scale range, so that some elements are only displayed within a certain scale. In addition, you can set table data query parameters or precise coordinate points based on street addresses during Geographic Encoding.

 

Administrator

The second application of ArcIMS is administrator, which is an important part of controlling how a website runs. The main role of administrator is to create and start the map service. The map service is created based on the Axl file generated by author. The map service is essentially a view of the data you want to publish.

Administrator also has some other general functions. You can use it to maintain the type of website you want to publish on the Web server, or add or configure the ArcIMS space server to effectively balance requests and responses to improve their efficiency, view website statistics.

The Administrator will be detailed later in this lesson.

 

Designer

The third ArcIMS application allows developers to design websites based on the map service created in administrator.

Determine the map service and its Topic display to be used by the website, and design the website for it. You can use the templates prepared by designer to create a website. The HTML browser template allows map images to be transmitted between the customer and the server, while the Java browser can also transmit vector elements, which will be discussed later.

Once you select which browser template to use, the designer wizard allows you to further design your website. For example, you can customize the tool bar of the client by selecting the tool you want the user to use, or you can change the color of the scale bar, navigation window, elements, and display range.

 

Manager

ArcIMS manager is another simple tool for creating and maintaining websites. It uses a wizard-based method to guide website programmers to create websites. In fact, the Manager contains three main components of ArcIMS: Author, disigner, and administrator.

Using manager has many advantages over using the above three components. The first is to complete all the work in a program, with guidance and explanations, especially for some new users, you can quickly and efficiently create a website. Secondly, the manager can be managed through remote login, the other three applications do not work. As long as the network is connected, you can log on from one machine to another machine with ArcIMS manager to create or modify webpages. Therefore, theoretically, a website programmer can design a webpage from a computer in New York and store it on a computer in Los Angeles.

 

Help

The ArcIMS help system is a very important resource. It can quickly guide you to find a large number of topics you want to know or the steps required to complete a special task. Online help can be used in the network-based manager window or application-based author, designer, and administrator.

In the ArcIMS application-based help system, click the contents tab to view the Help content. The content is organized as a topic. You can double-click a topic to view its content in detail. If you want to query, click the index tag and enter a keyword. related entries are displayed. Double-click the entry you want to view the content of the topic in detail.

You can also find some problems in the FAQ. Here, you will find many frequently asked questions and their possible answers. In addition, the ArcIMS help system also contains an ArcIMS and GIS vocabulary.

The network-based help system in Manager also contains a hyperlink connecting to the ESRI homepage and the ArcIMS homepage.