Conference reports 2001

As published before, friendlyGIS® was attending the conferences 'GE Smallworld 2001' in Paris and 'SWUG Tagung 2001' in Constance (at the border of the famous Lake Constance) as a exhibitor.

While we will not report the speeches held on the conferences - there are enough sources of information about them - we will tell you about some impressions regarding SW-Lookup®

friendlyGIS® has demonstrated its product SW-Lookup® on both conferences with the following configuration:

• A 700 MHz Pentium with 128 MB of RAM, therefor being a very mid-sized GIS machine, has been used as a PeerServer.
• To demonstrate the usage of the SW-Lookup® dispatcher on a Linux workstation, we ran it on a 120 MHz Pentium with 32 (!!!) MB of RAM. While Linux was very busy just starting up, the dispatcher was running cleanly for days. This shows, how efficient this piece of software has been designed.
• To demonstrate the usage of SW-Lookup® on different browsers (Microsoft, Netscape, StarOffice, HotJava) we used a Notebook with 700 MHz Pentium and 64 MB RAM.

As you can see, we intentionally broke the tradition of demonstrating our products on a racecar, while clients want to run them on a minivan!

People who saw the system running will be able to tell that the response times with this, really modest configuration, were nevertheless satisfying.

GE Smallworld 2001, Paris / Frankreich, Juni 4th to 6th, 2001

Official homepage: GE Smallworld 2001

Because Paris is the home of one of the most sympathetic automobiles, the so-called "duck" (Citroen 2CV), we decided to do our journey to Paris with the friendlyGIS® duck...

700 km will seem a lot with such a small car - but at last the journey became a lot of fun. Simple things may be charming!

Conference

'Le Meridien' is a very noble hotel - finding its expression in red velvet on the fair booths. Not always practical, especially if the people on the conference were not forced to walk along the booth rows, something many exhibitors were complaining about. Therefore, the first day was a quiet day for the exhibitors.

Fortunately, this was changing on the second day, so that some really interesting connections to companies in the Netherlands, the USA and other countries could be established. Because friendlyGIS® is looking for partners right now, this alone might have been worth the effort.

Some interesting supporting acts gave the conference the right framework - especially important in a city like Paris which is well-known for its atmosphere.

SWUG-Tagung, Constance / Germany, June 18th to 20th 2001

Official homepage: SWUG Tagung

The SWUG conference was held, luckily or not, two weeks after the show in Paris. This might have been the main reason why nearly no germans were found in Paris.

Those were, however, arriving in crowds in Constance, and the run on our booth was so intensive that many interested people had to come over several times in order to find ourselves having time to answer their questions and listen to their own ideas. We apologize to everyone affected!

We were able to demonstrate some individual customisations of SW-Lookup®, as:

• An example, how we can produce a totally different output by writing some Magik code. In our example, you can get a list of customers connected with a given pipe in a water network (through a network trace) and present them as a table in HTML with a graphics.
• A second example showed the same information, now presented as a PDF file which was generated on-the-fly and sent over the network using SW-Lookup®.

The reactions showed that though SW-Lookup® is designed to be a ready-to-use, data-model independant plug-in software, the need for simple customisation should also be kept in mind. This has already been taken into account with the new 1.21 version, where you will find a programmer's manual and the RWO interface has been streamlined to simplify customisation either through partners or end users.

What we have learned

One of the most important aspects on attending conferences as an exhibitor is the possibility to get in touch with many different (prospective) clients in a short time. This allows to find out their needs, compare them and find solutions which will solve most problems without having to do everything for everyone individually.

Some ideas have already been realised with the new version 1.21, which was work in progress during the conference time and is now available for GIS 3.1(0) (2.2(1) will follow soon).

We will keep you informed about the intended enhancements. Currently, we are checking out what can be done in which time frame.

You may be keen about what will be coming out, surely we will find some interesting, innovative and nonetheless simple and secure solutions to offer.