Yep, recently I am very busy preparing our project for this exhibition. The exhibition has been started on 23 August 2006. It is held at Assembly Hall, Jakarta Convention Center. You should come man, there are many interesting products in there.
One of interesting stands is the biggest one. I think it is located near the entrance gate. Today, in this stand, I met with one of lead programmers of A COOL GIS. The software is very similar to google earth or virtual earth. However, it can be used both offline and online. The best part was, it is opensource. Then, I asked to him, how the company can get revenue from this product? He said that they give technical support and consultation of using this product. I can imagine that how complete the software is, even it can show the polarimetric image combined with the optical one. Also he added that google earth costed around 2 billion dollars. Such a big number eeh? Another interesting fact was, the software was developed by using Visual Studio 2005 Express only. Then I asked, why he used c#, why he didn't use java or the others iconing open source project. He said that c# is very good and handy in developing this one. In addition, he said that usually he deploys the software in linux server using mono. Yep, mono has showed its power in this time. Imagine, GIS usually has a very huge database system, so I can safe to say that mono's stability is quite good in handling such big data. The best part came when I was asking why he want to be a lead programmer in open source project? the answer was simple, he was employed by the company to continue the development of the software so that the company can take advantages from it. I mean, at first, he developed it and later on the company approached him and finally employed him. This is the first time I saw the real example a successful person coming from open source community. Man, you should try the software... and maybe you can have YAGEOVE GIS (YetAnotherGoogleEarthOrVirtualEarth Geographics Information System) :)
Well, what is my project? Actually it is a very long standing project... maybe I can call it research. The project is VMS (Virtual Map System), or more common it is called as digital street map. Yea yea, the map can be used by PocketPC. The idea is rather not fresh anymore, however, I can say that the engine developed by my team is great, since it is implemented on PocketPC having very very limited resources. I'm very happy that the engine is so good that it has the same feature with other software made by international vendor. Hmm... The software are developed by using c++.. I use both evc++ and visual studio 2005 c++. This is a native c++, so we don't use dot net until now due to the nature of the software needing a very efficient and effective resources usage.
Unfortunately, as there are other products made by my University, my shinny software cannot be highlighted properly.
This is vms in action. Cool eeh?
FYI, the engine was developed from the stracth.. so, it is not the same with GE's or VE's engine.
In this exhibition, we are giving the software for free to the visitor. I have uploaded for helping those who don't have time to come to the exhibition. You can click here for the unzipped version , or this one for the smaller one. If you are interested and want to have further information (maybe you want to use the engine for your GIS project), please do contact me at arnoldw.id at gmail.com, or, you can contact to the contact information supplied on the about dialog box. I and my team won't stop at this point, the research still is active until now.. :)
any comments or critics regarding to the software are welcome :)