Preface

The last decade has seen a boom in people becoming acclimated to location technology. Most users may not fully realize that they’re using location technology when they get an alert on their phone that there’s traffic on the way home, or when they get a coupon from an app on their phone for a local restaurant. Smart phones are no longer simply devices for making phone calls, texting, and checking email. For many people, they’ve not only replaced the heavy and clumsy map book that your passenger used to help you navigate, but these “phones” have also replaced the expensive in-dash GPS systems in our vehicles. It’s so easy today to say the name of a store or venue into your phone, and in seconds receive turn-by-turn directions. That’s not to say that these directions may not try to direct you into a lake, but there’s no denying that location technology has become part of our daily lives. We gladly share our current locations with friends and family with as much fervor as when we shared a photo a few years ago. Maps and the information they can convey are great tools that developers should take time to learn to use.

A few years ago, I was tasked with upgrading an enterprise GIS application and bringing it into the modern non-mainframe era. Esri had just started releasing Web APIs for use with their technology. At the time, I built my application with the Flex API, and I delved deep into the world of ActionScript and Flex modular development, but it always felt a bit heavy-handed.

Over time, the Esri JavaScript API became more appealing. It performed better with each release and offered new features that worked with the latest updates to ArcGIS Server. At some point, my focus switched entirely from Flex development to JavaScript, and I immersed myself in every nook and cranny of the API.

I’ve had the pleasure over the years of building numerous applications with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript, even building a business around creating web-mapping applications. I’ve tried to follow each learning hump with a blog post or a presentation to share what I have learned. This is my way of paying it forward—paying it forward for all those blog posts I spent late nights digging through, simply to fix some odd bug or solve a problem I was ready to give up on, and for all the presentations I’ve attended that inspired me to build and learn, to create useful tools and applications, and to strive to learn what I didn’t even know I wanted or needed to learn. This book brings together the knowledge I’ve gained and puts it all in one place. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I did writing it.

I also hope you take the foundations laid out here to explore what you can do with web mapping with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and build some really cool things. Because as developers, isn’t that what we all want to do? Just build.