Frequently Asked Questions

Absolutely. We love the ArcGIS suite of products and programming resources. They are stable, well designed and well documented. But we are not dependent upon them. There are some very good alternative products out there, including QGIS, uDig, MapLarge, Open Street Map, and Leaflet. We more than capable of developing geospatial applications on any of these platforms, and many others.

Timeline for any development project can vary quite a bit. A blind estimate will either discourage you, or instill unrealistic expectations. Neither ever leads to good things. The best approach is for us to have a brief conversation about what your needs and priorities are before we discuss timeline. This will give our team what we need to provide you with specific information that will allow us to plan our next steps confidently.

With very (and we mean very) few exceptions, the answer is yes. In some scenarios we may implement an Extract Transform Load (aka ETL) pipeline to introduce data into your application. ETL is a process where data is extracted from an unstructured source such as a text document, or even a web page, then processed to fit into a structured system such as a database. ETL pipeline development happens to be something that we are particularly good at, so bring on your weirdest data source – we’ll be glad to help!

Sure! The same skillset that makes for great geospatial applications also makes for great pretty-much-anything-else applications. Geospatial application development is our specialty, but we are regularly engaged with projects that are not necessarily GIS-related. Please feel free to contact us and tell us about what you have in mind.

Several. Although programming and scripting languages can vary a great deal in syntax, all of them follow a common fundamental design philosophy. Our combined decades of expertise allow us to easily pick up and start writing complex applications, plugins, and scripts in any functional, XML-based, or object-oriented language. These include ActionScript, BASIC, C, C++, C#, dMinor (a XML-based scripting language we developed to perform data mining on websites), Java, JavaScript, LISP, Lua, MXML, Objective-C, PHP, Prolog, SQL, TypeScript, Visual Basic, and many other languages, APIs (there are some authored by us that are publicly available), and frameworks.