Abe Gillespie made it official today on the zigGIS Google Group: development on zigGIS will cease.
I’ve been meaning to make an announcement that zigGIS has officially reached its end-of-life since the next version of ArcGIS should support direct read / write interoperability with PostGIS (thereby rendering zigGIS moot). I was delaying the announcement because I was hoping we could test PgMap and, if it was any good, suggest it as an alternative during the interim. But we haven’t been able to test it yet.
In any case, PgMap is free, so why not give it a try? I’m sure the list would appreciate any feedback you could give.
This is obviously a something of a bittersweet, though expected, development for me. Although I ceased my involvement with zigGIS last year, I was still rooting for it. Abe had a lot of cool plans for it but the fact that ArcGIS will natively support direct read/write to its supported spatial databases really renders zigGIS unnecessary. Its primary value at this point would be support for earlier versions of ArcGIS but that’s not really enough to justify so much time and effort.
In terms of ArcGIS, this is a good development. Direct read/write is a capability that always needed to be there and now it will be. When I first got involved with zigGIS, PostGIS wasn’t supported at all so it made a lot of sense. At the time, I was stuck in a windowless room building a personnel system, so working on zigGIS in the evenings helped be stay connected to the geospatial world. It enabled me to work with Abe and Paolo Corti; a fact that I will always treasure. Abe put a lot of sweat into zigGIS over its lifetime and I am honored to have helped him in some small way. zigGIS also brought me into contact with phenomenally supportive users, such as Regina Obe and Steven Citron-Pousty, from both of whom I learned a great deal.
Some of the first posts on this blog were about zigGIS. It’s hard to believe I’ve just written my last one.
The PgMap product that Abe mentions can be found here.
UPDATE: Later in the same discussion on the zigGIS group, Abe responded to a question about opening the latest version of the code (version 2.x) this way:
I’m planning on doing just that. But I didn’t want to
announce anything yet because I have very little free time right now
and don’t know when I can get to it.
The full discussion thread is here: http://groups.google.com/group/ziggis/browse_thread/thread/14ae8a351564de9e
