Loader of the Things: One Library to Load Them All

UPDATE 5/11/18: The recently released @arcgis/webpack-plugin is a viable alternative to esri-loader if you are using webpack with the latest version of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. See this blog post for details on when you should use one or the other.

The esri-loader library hit the 2.0.0 milestone this week.  This release doesn’t add any features, but merely removes the old callback APIs that were deprecated when we introduced the promise-based ones in v1.5.0. If you’ve been using the new APIs, you can save yourself a few bytes by upgrading to 2.0.0. You can read more in the 2.0.0 release notes.

One does not simply load modules from the ArcGIS API

One does not simply load modules from the ArcGIS API

The work leading up to this milestone got me reflecting on the broader state of loading ArcGIS API for JavaScript modules and I came to this conclusion:

If your ArcGIS web application uses any other module loader besides the Dojo loader (i.e. webpack, Rollup.js, etc.), you should be using esri-loader.

That’s a bold statement, so let me back it up.

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Happy holidays from the cedar team!

cedar logo - holiday style

This week we released cedar 1.0.0 in beta and updated the charts in the Hub to use the new version. This lays the ground work for us to make it simpler for ArcGIS Hub users to create and share richer visualizations of their open data.

The focus of cedar v1 is making it easier to create multi-series charts with data from one or more feature layers. Here are a few highlights of what will be changing in v1:

Take a few moments to play around with the new cedar for yourself and let us know what you think.

Cedar multi-series line chart

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Generating Custom Widgets for Esri’s WebApp Builder with Yeoman

Recently I’ve been developing custom widgets for the ArcGIS Web AppBuilder, and I have found that there is a lot of boilerplate code that you have to create for each new widget. I thought that a Yeoman generator would be a useful way to scaffold out the widget files, so I created generator-esri-appbuilder-js.

What It Does

The package contains a couple of generators that walk users through a series of prompts to gather information about a custom widget that they want to develop for the Web AppBuilder, and then scaffolds out the widget’s files.

Screenshot of running the generator-esri-appbuilder-js generators
The generator prompts you for widget properties and then scaffolds out the required files.

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Community Maps Contribution Management Application Released

For the better part of my first year at Esri, I have been working on a web application for the Community Maps Program that would make it easier for program contributors to upload and manage their data contributions. We released a minimally viable version of the web application in the fall of 2012 which focused on letting users register for the program and upload data. Since then we have focused on creating an application that lets users manage the complete lifecycle of their contributions from upload, through data review, map cache generation, and finally incorporation into the Esri basemaps. This version came out of beta at the beginning of this month.

The application is for program participants only, but if you are interested in learning more about or contributing to the program you can learn more by visiting the ArcGIS Online features page for Community Maps.

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Creating Mapping Applications with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and Dojo Bootstrap

When the design team doesn’t do Dijit*

Recently, our design team delivered a functional HTML wireframe that was developed with Twitter Bootstrap. Ordinarily that would not be a problem, but the application we’re working on is based on the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and as such relies entirely on Dojo. The developers wanted to be able to leverage as much of the designers work as we could without having to include jQuery – a dependency of Bootstrap’s JavaScript components. A little digging around lead me to Kevin Andre’s Dojo Bootstrap project – a pure Dojo implementation of Twitter Bootstrap. We were able to successfully use Dojo Bootstrap in our ArcGIS API for JavaScript based mapping application. This enabled us to leverage the declarative mark up and styles already written by the designers without adding a jQuery dependency.

Just in time for the 2013 Esri International Developer Summit, I’ve created a simple application that demonstrates how to incorporate Dojo Bootstrap with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript:

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