Track: Application Development
Strategies for Designing and Building Reusable GIS Application Components
Rod KuhnsThis paper presents software engineering strategies for designing and building reusable GIS application software. With proper planning and execution, these methodologies will bring significant cost savings and efficiency gains to one of the most expensive aspects of customizing GIS software tools. Organizations employing contractors to develop software applications, as well as application developers, will benefit from these methodologies. This paper does not discuss the Microsoft component object model (COM), which Esri will utilize to provide application developers with access to Esri software objects assembled by Esri. The new Esrisoftware direction based on the Microsoft COM paradigm will greatly enhance the thirdparty application development environment in the future, and it is also consistent with the reuse strategies discussed in this paper. The paper presents time proven methods and tools for creating, managing, and accessing a library of reusable software components. In addition, costbenefit guidelines are developed to help an organization decide when the benefits involved in implementing reusable coding procedures outweigh the implementation overhead. Specific recommendations are made for code documentation practices, software design, and management procedures that encourage and result in successful code reuse practices. One of the major challenges of building reusable software in the GIS environment is the high dependencies of the application on a specific "client-dependent" data model. The paper will address how to deal with specific application data dependencies and engineer software components for portability across different data models.
Rod Kuhns
Convergent Group
6200 S. Syracuse Way
Englewood, CO 80111
USA
Telephone: 303-741-8400
Fax: 303-741-8401
E-mail: Rod.Kuhns@cvg-grp.com