The Friday night keynote address, "Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life", given by Jared Richardson, provided the impetus for this blog. Learning new technologies is exciting and it's necessary for moving forward, but it's also important to share what's learned. There are many options for doing that and one that's easy and possible for any level of knowledge is to write a blog. So here I am finally getting started on something I've been meaning to do for quite awhile.
My current employeer has me investigating portlet technologies and how to apply them to the field of Geographic Information Systems. Yes, the Google Maps API is ubiquitous and a wonderful tool. But the world of government contracting, where I live, is hesitant to tie themselves to proprietary data and systems. The focus in my department is on Open Source solutions, in particular, Sun Java technologies.
I still have 4 sessions today to attend at the Symposium. The sessions Friday and yesterday were all terrific and, for me, the absolute best was "GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Application", given by Scott Davis. There was a "Eureka" moment where I may have the solution to a problem that's been bugging me on one of the map portlets I've been building. At least I know where I will start looking as soon as I get back to work tomorrow. If I don't win one of today's raffles, I will be investing the $ to get Scott's book on GIS for Web Developers. He didn't have time in his talk to get into the level of detail that I hope to find in his book on the OpenLayers chapter. Sometimes a book is what I most need and with OpenLayers I haven't yet found good documentation. Open Source is awesome, but, of course, we can't expect to find the level of documentation that comes with a commercial product. But, as Jared pointed out in his talk that just means there's another opportunity for someone like me to share my experiences in using and learning OpenLayers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment