A VertiGIS Studio Web Roadmap (sort of)
Épinglée En avant
Does VertiGIS Studio Web (VSW) have a roadmap? How can I get a better sense of whether a feature I'm interested in might be developed?
Fair questions, and very challenging to answer. For those of you who haven't met me, my name is Cam Barnard and I am the Product Manager for VertiGIS Studio Web and the Product Director for VertiGIS Studio.
While it is not, strictly speaking, a roadmap; I thought you would benefit from a written summary of the themes that have driven many of our development decisions to date, and the order in which we are addressing those themes.
Keep in mind as you read these, that requests by customers, partners, and our own services group can, and should also play a major role in when a specific feature is implemented.
As always, questions and discussion are welcome!
Theme 1 – Information presentation and visualization
Initial versions of VSW were focused almost exclusively upon ensuring that geospatial information could be visualized well, and interacted with effectively, in an attractive layout. The vision here was to take a set of use cases that apply to both new and existing customers and to do them thoroughly so that everyone could begin to use VSW even before it had full feature parity. This theme has taken the majority of our development effort to date, and is now largely complete. To date this has included:
- A new configuration framework
- Flexible layouts by separating component behavior from component presentation
- Support for component arity – allowing multiple of the same component in an app
- Support for multiple layouts within an application
- Support for composition – allowing a single configuration component to be reused
- Support for 2D maps and 3D scenes in a single entity with the ability to toggle back and forth
- 2D maps support heatmaps
- Standard map/scene navigation and zoom controls
- Support for multiple 2D maps and 3D scenes side by side in an application with the ability to synchronize the location between them
- Color and theme your application to match your organization’s look and feel
- Map Context Menu
- Coordinates widget
- Reverse geocode address widget
- Simple Layer List
- Legend
- Layer presets switcher
- Base map switcher
- Location Bookmarks
- Device Geolocation
- Scalebar
- Scale Selector
- Coordinates of mouse on map
- I Want To… menu
- Toolbar
- Extent-specific Search
- Identify
- Results Highlighting and Labels
- Map filter effects
- Results List
- Results Table
- Result Details
- Result Actions
- Charts
- KPI Cards
- Buffering tools
- VertiGIS Studio Workflow support
- VertiGIS Studio Reporting support
- VertiGIS Studio Printing support
- Embedded Map Mode
- Hooks and markers for integrating 3rd party street level or aerial imagery
- User Preferences with information density toggle
- Social sharing link generation
- Layer catalog
- Control layer transparency
- End-user Layer reordering
- More control over results list and result details views
- Enhanced layer list features: e.g. layer filter
Theme 2 – Adding end-user information to the application
Tools and capabilities allowing end users to interact with information presented to them. The vision here is to begin to allow end users a more complete set of tools for interacting with the geospatial information that has been presented to them.
- Measurement tools
- Redline Markup tools
- Add a layer to the map
- Add file-based data to the map
- Re-symbolization of user uploaded layers
- End-user control over color and symbology of markup
- Plot coordinates on the map
- Markup shapes
- Markup text labels (via location notes)
Theme 3 – Getting information out of the application
Getting results out of the application is often done with an information product such as a report, but sometimes you want raw results, or sub-sets of geospatial data.
- Download results to a CSV, XLSX, Shapefile
- Guided import wizard
- [future] Export and Extract data tools
Theme 4 – Feature Editing
Editing is a common use case, this is one of the most frequent requests we are seeing currently for VertiGIS Studio Web that isn't already there.
- Edit feature workflow creation template
- Add Feature tool (also available via Workflow)
- Edit Feature tool (also available via Workflow)
- Snapping tools
- [soon] COGO editing Workflow
- [future] Advanced editing tools: union and cut, data grid editing
Theme 5 – Enterprise Web GIS
There are a number of heavier weight features that are very important for some enterprise Web GIS use cases, but that aren't used by the majority of VertiGIS Studio customers. The list may not be long, but the effort to create these things is significant.
- query builder
- starred results (with commands supporting multiple results sets and set operations)
- save and load application state via projects
- UI show/hide by user/group
Finally, keep in mind that as we are developing VertiGIS Studio Web we are working to ensure that features are available in both 2D and 3D, and that they are WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliant.
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Hi Steve Schunzel that article now lives here: Is feature X that was in GVH available in VSW yet? – VertiGIS
Note this new URL is due to our transition to our new VertiGIS Community.
Re: a comparison matrix of VertiGIS vs Esri solutions, I'm not aware of one though I can certainly see the need.
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Steve Schunzel ... missed that one in the comment stream. Updated link is:
This one is also pinned at the top of the community posts since it is often referenced.
No comparison matrix comparing all four viewer frameworks exists that I'm aware of, you are right that would be a big endavor. I think one of the reasons you don't see something like this is that it would be inherently 'tool/feature' focused when the decision making criteria between those frameworks should be about more than just its current list of features.
Examples that come to mind.
GVH/Web AppBuilder are both based on Esri's JavaScript 3.x API, building a new app with those is fine if what it provides solves your problem today, but investing custom development in either would be an investment in a soon to be end of life technology from Esri.
Framework considerations is another area. Both VSW and Experience Builder are based on Esri's JavaScript 4.x API, and both can be extended using VertiGIS Studio Workflow so for many cases you could use either and they look similar. VSW starts to shine when you begin to wrestle with larger framework considerations. What if you need to internationalize your application? What if your application is public facing and needs to be WCAG AA accessibility compliant? What if you want a SaaS application, but you also want to add some of your own custom modules to it. VSW handles those three scenarios well, while Experience Builder can't really handle any of the three (at least today).
Finally, I encourage people to think about history and track record. Compare the 'mature' version of GE/GVH to the 'mature' version of Web AppBuilder. Part of our core business at VertiGIS is supplying a really great viewer framework with as many out of the box tools and capabilities as possible to help folks build great apps. We don't generally stop until we've achieved that. I'd argue that Web AppBuilder stopped far short of that. To be fair, it appears that Esri is continuing their investment in Experience Builder (more so than they did in Web AppBuilder) but I'm pretty confident that in 12-24 months when you put VertiGIS Studio Web and Experience Builder side-by-side you'd prefer to use VertiGIS Studio Web. For us, it is CORE to everything we do. For Esri, it is one of many, many things that they are working on.
Cam
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@..., Cam Barnard Thank you both for the quick, thoughtful replies! It's very helpful. We're fortunate to have all these tools available to us, but some of our folks aren't familiar enough with ExB and VSW so I was hoping create some sort of guide for them. I think the best solution will be for them to just jump in. Your comment about VSW being at the core of what you do is spot on and together with fantastic support is a huge advantage that I'll be sure to mention.
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I would say just have them Jump right in and use the forums for questions. There is a VSW class they can attend as well.
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Steve Schunzel https://data.latitudegeo.com/Cam/gvh-vsw-feature-matrix.pdf
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Updated post to reflect state of Web at 5.26
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Hi there,
when will be [soon] COGO editing Workflow (Theme 4 – Feature Editing) available?
Kind regards
Christoph
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