So Long Web ADF, We Hardly Liked....er, Knew Ye

Ah, another year sans ESRI UC. Fortunately there are so many live-blogging-twitteratti there that the only thing I feel I’m missing out on is San Diego’s distinct lack of soul-crushing humidity.

I came across Dave Bouwman’s blog post on the Web ADF, and followed it back to its source at Esri.

While ESRI will continue supporting existing JSF and ASP.NET developers with quality improvements and technology updates to the Web ADFs, major emphasis will be put on the ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs. For example, the ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs will incorporate support for all new services and enhanced service capabilities included with ArcGIS Server 10 (e.g., Feature Service, Time support, etc.). The Web ADFs will not incorporate these new features.

Based on customer feedback and technology trends, we see the Web ADFs playing a decreasing role amongst ArcGIS Server developers in favor of alternatives such as the ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs.

The Web ADFs will be deprecated in the next release after ArcGIS Server 10.


Whenever Esri releases something like AGS, it comes with a whole bunch of seemingly random clients, most of which will become losers over time. Anybody that tried to use the Web ADF smelled loser. It’s ArcStorm awful. I feel bad for the folks that made an investment in the ADF, but I’m sure not going to miss it.