One day our end user came to us and said, "we found this cool new tool that ESRI provides called a Flex Viewer
that allows us to create our own web maps without needing you pesky IT people." Soon after they returned to
us and said, "we created this map for someone, but they're telling us that not everyone should be allowed
to see it. Maybe we do need you after all."
So the issue is, how do we allow our customers to continue to create and edit their own maps, and secure
the maps so that only certain people could see them. Other considerations were, retaining copies of old
configuration files for back up and recovery, and using a single library of widgets for all viewers.
Our solution was to wrap a Flex Viewer in a J2EE container, store all the configuration files in a
database, and create a front end for our customers to edit the configuration files. You then have to
get access to any configuration file you want to edit or view as a map.
This has been a great success at our company. We currently have 15 flex viewers in production, and
almost 40 in the development phases. All run off the same web server. All use the same library of
available widgets. The viewer in use is the standard Flex Viewer from ESRI. We have upgraded it twice
from 2.3 to 2.4 to 2.5
