"Plug and play" Geospatial applications
Dennis F. Beck
Vice-President - Business Development
Smallworld Systems, Inc.
5600 Greenwood Plaza Blvd
(303) 779-6980
(303) 779-1051 (fax)
Email: dermis. beck@smallworld-us.com
Overview
Plug and Play has a really good sound to it. Just stick it in, and it runs. No worries, no
problems, your business needs are met. Like so many marketing phrases and buzz words
it begins to stick and really takes on a special meaning of its own. The phrase plug and
play was coined by the computer hardware industry. Prompted by Microsoft, and their
desire to move from the complexities of attaching devices, such as printers, Plug and Play
established a much easier approach by taking away the manual effort of having to define
the attached devices on a computer or network. Then it was simply a matter of "plugging
and playing".
Since its early beginnings the software industry has continually evolved from having
unique, custom applications for every organization to a more widespread acceptance of
packaged solutions. Packaged solutions in turn, are evolving from having been very
heavily customized to now being ready for use with minimal customization. All of this is
possible because of the reality of Moore's Law. Moore's Law was observed by Gordon
Moore back in 1965. Moore was preparing a speech and started to graph data about the
growth in memory chip performance when he realized that each new chip contained
roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-
24 months of the previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power
would rise exponentially over relatively brief periods of time
1.
Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued
and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for many planners' performance forecasts.
In just over 25 years the number of transistors on a chip has increased more than 3,200
times, from 2,300 on the 4004 in 1971 to 7.5 million on the Pentiurn@ II processor. With
hardware solutions continuing to support Moore's Law, Plug and Play applications takes
on a new importance. The big cost items in a system implementation are often times not
the hardware or software anymore, but rather the resources necessary to make the whole
system work. Trained personnel are commanding great premiums to make these systems
come together. And with real competitive pressures driving the need to automate
businesses, the solution that has the best functions and gets in faster for less money will
be the winner.
This problem of the continuing need for skilled technologists to deploy applications has
been termed by David Taylor as the "Software Crisis"
2 By relying on applications that
do not require heavy customization it is possible to greatly reduce the need for
programmatic customization of software applications. Plug and Play geospatial
applications may well solve this problem for our industry.
This paper presents a definition of the concept of plug and play and looks at how this has
historically evolved in the software industry. The concept is then related to geospatial
software applications. The different technologies and standards, such as COM/DCOM,
CORBA and Open GIS that support plug and play geospatial applications are explored
and contrasted. Examples of the use of these applications are then related to different
Geospatial business areas.
