esri-leaflet developed by ESRI developers?

[michellechristmas]

Is the information found on github for ESRI-leaflet, officially part of the ESRI development team for Leaflet? What I mean is https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet officially being developed by ESRI developers.

I know this may sound like a pedestrian type of questions since Github is a social network for developers.

But I am a bit confused, and trying to figure out if ESRI-Leaflet has been developed by ESRI,

or it is independent project where someone was able to developed an extention for ESRI,

but is not really part of the official ESRI developer community.

[PaulCrickard1]

It is developed by ESRI. It is in their Repo. They say it is a joint project between Esri PDX R+D - Esri PDX and the ESRI community.

There are other plugins that handle ESRI data developed by others - not ESRI.

[michellechristmas]

thank you!

[PatrickArlt1]

It is primarily developed and lead my Esri staff. Myself, John Gravois, Allan Laframboise and Tom Wayson are some of the core Esri contributors. There have also been contributions from community members who wanted or needed certain functionality. Things like min/max zoom, the find task, basic image service support and unit tests as well as bug fixes and documentation have all been contributed by community members at some point. But all of these community changes are vetted by the core team at Esri.

[michellechristmas]

thank you!

[JasonCleaver]

Question.  Will Esri continue to devote time and effort into this project or will be be left behind at some point?  My intent is not be disrespectful, just realistic.

[JohnGravois]

will this project be left behind at some point?

hi Jason,

thats kind of a tough question to answer, as i'm not familiar with too many scenarios when software companies plan proactively to leave a project behind in the future.

as far as realism goes, we are actively maintaining the project now and intend to continue (in parallel with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript) as the contributing team feel very strongly that Leaflet is cool and that its valuable to give our customers options.

we also take great satisfaction in working out in the open and giving our extended community an opportunity to participate (from API design planning > to extending functionality, working on the website and fixing bugs)

see the FAQ below for more info.

FAQ · Esri/esri-leaflet Wiki · GitHub

[PatrickArlt1]

John and I are definitely committed to maintaining Esri Leaflet and feel that it is a good option for some of Esri's customers and there is ample opportunity for the community to contribute to the health of the project as well.

The development pace had slowed lately as many of the core contributors have commitments to other projects, most of us have regular tasks and projects in addition to working on Esri Leaflet, but this should pick up again after dev summit.

In short no one is planning on leaving this behind in the future.

[JasonCleaver]

Hello John/Patrick

Thanks to the both of you for the follow-up.  I have written apps using the JavaScript API and find it very easy to work with, although the "footprint" is sometimes quite large for a simple app.  I'll have to dive a little more into the Esri Leaflet API to see if I can use it for future projects.  I guess my question stems from having built Silverlight apps...and we know how that story ended.

[JohnGravois]

appreciate the comments and interest.

native JS/HTML5 is here to stay (for now anyway)