Research On WebGIS Based On Flex And REST

WebGIS,namely the World Wide Web geographic information systems,is a technology that uses interactive Internet technology to expand and improve the geographic information system,it is a combination of Internet and GIS.With the growing impact of the Internet,as well as the wider use of GIS technology to various industries,the users have been not satisfied with the performance and interactive effects of the current web-page based WebGIS,and scalability of system and simplicity of development is also a higher demand.RIA(Rich Internet Application) with excellent interaction and user experience,is a new generation of web application, which not only bring about revolutionary changes in Internet applications,but also bring a new opportunity for WebGIS development,and Flex is currently the most mainstream of the development of RIA and is very promising.REST(Representational State Transfer) is a new style of Web services,it takes any information that servers want to share as a resource,and each resource gets an URI,the client can access to the resource by the URI and operate it.Based on these two new technologies,the writer studies how to integrate Flex technology and REST style of architecture applied to the WebGIS,which can improve the performance and interactive of WebGIS and reduce development complexity,increase system scalability at the same time.First of all,the page studied the Flex technology and the characteristics of REST style architecture and put forward the method of developing WebGIS with ArcGIS API for Flex.After that,grid project management WebGIS system was completed.The client program is developed with Flex while the server-side uses ESRI's ArcGIS Server 9.3 to publish map services.Through the REST API,the client-side program can directly interact with ArcGIS Server's Web services.The system developed runs smoothly and never need to refresh the page and it has greater advantages than HTML based WebGIS in the ways like animation effects,reaction speed,multimedia integration,chart display,transparency control etc,and it can mashup resources from many different sources which can prove it has good scalability.The study shows that WebGIS with Flex and REST has broad prospects.