ArcIMS Goes Out With a Whimper

We sent a couple of people to the ESRI Developer’s Summit this year. I thought I’d peruse the conference schedule to see what I was missing.*

I didn’t see anything I was missing that would cause me to cry in my beer, but I did notice something it was missing. I looked over the schedule, thought for a minute, looked over the schedule a second time, then did a text find in Adobe Reader to confirm what I wasn’t seeing.

Out of the entire developer’s conference, there is only one session that even mentions ArcIMS. The session?

ArcGIS Server for ArcIMS Developers [...] This session will focus on how to take existing ArcIMS applications and build [ArcGIS] server solutions with the same or additional functionality.

While ArcIMS has been persona non grata since ArcGIS server was released, I think you can stick the proverbial fork in it. Or, for those of us who’ve used it extensively, “lure it to a lonely part of the river, and there, in the silence and the solitude, strangle it.”**

If you’ve got people on ArcIMS projects, it’s probably time to bail if it’s early or say “that and no more” and stop investing time and money in it. If you’re an ESRI-only shop, snuggle up with a dozen or so ArcObjects diagrams and a box of tissues. If not, there are a lot of great open source solutions you can try. But either way, every dollar you spend today on an ArcIMS project will mean two dollars spent in a year or so converting it to something else.

* “Missing” in this context is not used in the sense of “boy I really miss my Playstation 3”, but more in the sense of “gosh I just missed getting hit by that rhinoceros.”

** Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome. If you haven’t read it, you’re abusing yourself.