First Impressions of the ArcGIS Server REST/JS Api on my box

The install was essentially painless. Its such a huge improvement over the days of 9.0 and 9.1. One other thing that was nice was the ability to manage the server with ArcCatalog 9.2 - which leads me to think that either they either:

A) made an huge effort to make it backwards compatible or the more likely choice B) Not a whole lot has changed. Either way, I am happy. I was not, however able to load arcgis desktop 9.2 on the same machine, but thats not a big surprise.

So, now I was able to create 9.2 based mxd into 9.3. That was up and running very quickly. Then, it was obviously a piece of cake to get a simple app running with the JS api. I was using a ArcGISDynamicMapServiceLayer so it wasn't fast like a cached based service, but I was very very happy with the speed. I was a little scared to see how fast it was going to be.

I suspected that the samples that we had all been seeing and using from the esri based sample servers were huge monster clusters pumping maps out with just simple geometries. I still suspect thats the case - but I was equally impressed with the speed my Server in a VM was producing. When I get all my caches set up (hopefully 9.2 caches will work?) and this moved onto a proper production class machine, I expect these apps to fly.

Adding lines, turning off layers, etc (ie normal arcims like functionality that was so damn difficult with the web adf) has been easier than I thought - and I'm not a JS guy. This API is well documented and so far, very straightforward. I think ESRI realized that with the 9.3 release, it was time to put up or shutup. Well, folks, looks to me that they came through, and we all finally have what we have been waiting for. I am like a kid in a candy store - that has been waiting 4 years to get in.