Sorry, I'm new to arcgis and feeling pretty overwhelmed. I'm having trouble figuring out which products I even need to use.
Here's my situation: I'm working on a flex AIR application which we want to have the ability to show and path on. The pathing should be based on a shape file we have, though, not streets. I saw an allusion to the ability to use a shape file as a replacement for the street and let a server automatically path it, is that possible? I already have a pathing algo written in java which can be ported to anything if I need to implement the pathing manually.
Also, we want to show our shape file on an overlay of the usa. We have about 10K points, and a lot (under 150K) line segments. In looking into google maps, etc, this amount of data just couldn't be used natively, I had to render it into a transparent tiled png which was then used as a overlay. It appears that arcgis can just natively load a shape file - we can shrink it down and distribute it with the app if that's the best speed option. Given that we still need to do pathing server side, does this seem like a good idea?
Also, direct interaction with the map will be minimal, perhaps clicking on some of the points for info, but that will be not extensive. This is more to give a visual context to something that is happening in another part of the app. We can probably rely on our customers having beastly spec'd systems, but I'd rather spend a lot more time working upfront if it would help keep the client side lighter - snappiness on the client is important to me.
Thanks for taking a look and the help,
Jeff
