The difference between AE and AO

Before ArcGis9.0, Arcobject is not an independent product, has been bundled in desktop products, as long as you buy one of the desktop products, you can use arcboject development. Starting with ArcGis9.0, ESRI has launched ArcGIS engine which allows arcobject to be used as a stand-alone product. If you so develop a product that lets other users use, only need to purchase ArcGIS engine development on the line. ArcGIS engine includes ArcGIS runtime and Arcobject SDK (for dotnet, VB, C + +, Java). This way you don't need to buy expensive desktop to develop.
Often heard AO (arcobject) Development and AE (ArcGis Engine) development, the essence is no different, are using Arcobject. AE uses ArcGIS runtime This runtime to run the program, AO requires desktop product support. AE contains almost all of the ArcGIS components and can embed other programs to develop its own programs.         Therefore, AO development of the program must be installed desktop to run, and AE developed only to install the runtime ArcGIS Runtime, the two price difference is very large. So don't think AE development doesn't need arcobject.

The following two diagrams are the setup pages for ArcGIS Desktop 10 and ArcGIS Engine Developkit 10 respectively:


Obviously, in addition to the desktop product in this bag, there is the developer resource, the Arcobject SDK. No runtime, noticed.


This is ArcGIS Engine developkit 10 installation package, no desktop series, but runtime, and a variety of SDK.



So, now you should know the difference between AE and AO. It's just that the dependencies of running their programs are different, one is the expensive desktop product, the other is the cheaper one with the engine runtime development package.