Web Appbuilder heading to extinction

[LefterisKoumis]

 ESRI UC  introduced a new product called Experience Builder ( ArcGIS Experience Builder | A new way of building web apps) which  eventually will replace Web App builder. The new product will be based on JS API 4.x, React JS and Typescript. So, no more DOJO and Web Appbuilder will never be upgraded to JS API 4.x

The presenter said there are no plans to replace Web Appbuilder YET. We have seen it before when ESRI announced Web Appbuilder with no plans to discontinue support for FLEX. A year later they did.

[Jianxia]

Rod, what other 3D widgets are used in this user's case? 

[RodWoodfordOld]

Thanks for the prompt reply. They would be interested in the following if possible.

Query Widget, Select Widget, Attribute Widget, Draw Widget, Print Widget, Infographic Widget, Screening Widget and NearMe Widget . I put them in some sort of order of importance.

cheers

[Jianxia]

Rod, thank for sorting them out. I probably did not make my question clear. What I want to know are the 3D specific widgets, such as Slides, Daylight widgets, etc, which are not part of 2D widgets.

[RodWoodfordOld]

Sorry about that. We are using all available 3D widgets where possible. See one of our app links below.

ArcGIS Web Application 

The pressure I'm getting corporately is why cant I include current 2D functions into the 3D environment.

[RodWoodfordOld]

Just to add to this would it be possible to add a 3D line of sight widget.

[Jianxia]

Rod,

Thanks for sharing the app. It looks great!

From a technical perspective, currently, 2d widgets in Web AppBuilder are written in JSAPI 3.x while 3D widgets are written in JSAPI 4.x. As these APIs do not share the programming patterns, we can't simply move the 2d widgets to the 3d environment without completely rewriting them in JSAPI 4.x. With Experience Builder built on JSAPI 4.x, we are able to integrate 2d and 3d so these widgets can be used regardless they are in the 2d or 3d environment.  The list of widgets you provided will help us prioritize the development work on Experience Builder.  

Hope this helps,

Jianxia

[RodWoodfordOld]

Hi Jianxia,

Thanks for the info. Look forward to seeing Experience Builder in the near future. All the best.

cheers

[MichaelVolz]

Jianxia:

Is Experience Builder not going to be supported in Internet Explorer?  I ask because I've read that Edge is the replacement for IE with Windows 10, but Microsoft is thinking about dropping Edge for a different browser.

[Anonymous User]

I'll say, Experience Builder looks great!  Although I hope Esri will continue supporting and even updating WebApp Builder 2D for at least another year or two in active development.  It's going to be a large effort migrating dozens of production viewers to a very new architecture. I have some significantly customized WAB viewers that I have for various internal applications.  WAB 2D does what it does quite well. I do not need 3D yet.  I have done a couple 3D analyses in Pro for our airport and some line of sight commo stuff but no 3D viewers.

React / API 4.x do not solve too many problems I have, at least at the moment. MVC is cool. I can get in to that, I do .NET Core MD Bootstrap for sites. The Popup UI in 4.x will be better though this looks to be a design decision, as most of the things are possible in Dojo and 3.x - like moving popups, tabs, etc. Resizing could also be achieved. I'm wondering about this timeline because I am about to begin planning a major upgrade to 10.7 or 10.8 and Portal; and this is only to get Dashboards and featureLayer service tiling. The latter being a borderline need-to have because of slow performance for heavy layers from many users at once, and Dashboards being a very useful new kind of capability and that I want to host on premise. Therefore I need to focus on back-end next year. WAB took care of the front-end very well for us.

Experience Builder looks like a great compliment to WAB!  I would be happy to have that in addition to WAB 2D 3.x continued with active development for another year or two... Jianxia Song do you have a cutoff date for when we'll stop seeing new updates to WAB 2D and/or JS API 3.x? 

This is a bigger transition than Arc to Pro, for us in fact.  With ArcMap to Pro, it's professionals who understand tools and interfaces change over time and we're ready (soon...maybe next year) to start the transition. Not too worried about that. By then hopefully most of the things in ArcMap will be in Pro.  But with web viewers, they have deep integration with other systems and departments and also end users are far less tolerant of upgrading or changing interfaces. There has to be serious business reasons and ROI to 'sell' a change of interface to a user-facing application.  When I went from my old Flex viewers to native JS API viewers it was an easy sell, with all of Flash's issues. Native JS API sites to WAB with its vast array of powerful tools was also an easy sell, our sites now can do so much more. The thing is, I've now heavily customized WAB to fix or improve many of its limitations and it has just reached a good state.  Meantime, it's been great because the interface for WAB web viewers is now standardized, and the public is familiar with WebApp Builder's interface. I took time to write a detailed manual and YouTube videos for WAB. (example... SAGIS Property Map Viewer  )  

[LefterisKoumis]

That may be true for apps that have minimum custom script. 

Heavy customization that involves thousand lines of coding with multiple widgets, a conversion from DOJO to ReactJS can be a very time consuming effort.

I believe the Experience Builder (EB) is great for users who want to do minimal customization and use the drag and drop to create the UI of the app.  It seems that the EB is following the norm of other popular web development apps, which allow users to create UI through the drag and drop of the most used UI objects.

Many believe that  ESRI move from Flex to DOJO was the wrong succession choice.Perhaps, if they made a better choice before, there wouldn't be a need now to move to ReactJS. Like previously, ESRI didn't inform their users why they chose ReactJS over the other JS flavors.