Value Lab is a management consulting and IT solutions company that specializes in marketing, sales, and retailing. It developed a geomarketing solution called GeoIntelligence 5 using the ESRI ArcGIS platform and various Microsoft technologies. GeoIntelligence 5 was developed as a web application to be accessible on mobile devices and allow for customizations based on user accounts while maintaining performance and security.

2.  Value Lab is a management consulting and
IT solutions company specialized in
Marketing, Sales and Retailing
 Our goal is to help Manufactures, Retailers
and Service company to improve their
commercial performance and strengthen
their competitive positioning, supporting
their stratiegic decisions and operational
management
 Founded in 1990 we have two offices in
Milan and Rome and we operate in Italy and
abroad

3.  As IT system integrator and italian ESRI
Business Partner company we use and
customize a wide range of software
solutions including ESRI ArcGIS platform
 We provide geomarketing and geo-BI
solutions to our customers, based on our
micro-geographical data (at census and
street number level)

5.  We had a geomarketing solution based
on ESRI Silverlight API
› No browser vendor issues
› Great developer experience in terms of
technology and productivity
› Great third parties support in terms of tools
and UI widgets

6.  Then Steve Jobs "invented" a new
technology user experience: the mobile
touch
› iPhone started the smartphone era
› iPad started the tablet era
 Our customers, the old ones and the
new ones, started to ask us to play with
our web solution also on that devices

7.  We tried first to support iPad users
developing a prototype with ESRI ArcGIS
iOS API, but we realized that wasn't
possible for us to maintain several
different applications, one for every SDK
 We decided to try to embrace the "new-
wave" and its "write once, run
everywhere" promise: HTML5

8.  We know our end user scenario is very
particular:
› End user is usually a business analyst, he's
not a classical GIS user so our solutions are
not GIS centric: the map is only another
way to show performance KPIs
› Our end users usually are not particularly
interested in technology, but they ask for
usability and high customizations

9.  Yes you're right: "5" stands for HTML5
 We decided to develop a web solution
with specific features both server side
and client side:
› Maintainable
› Configurable and composable based on
user account
› Secure
› User friendly

10.  Server side GeoIntelligence5 is built on:
› Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3
› Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0
› Microsoft Entity Framework 4.x
› Microsoft WCF REST Services
› Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
› Combres

11.  Client side GeoIntelligence5 is built on:
› ArcGIS Javascript API
› jQuery
› jQuery UI
› Knockout JS
› Linq JS
 But most of all Javascript Design Patterns
› Inheritance, Namespace, Module, M-V-VM

12.  GeoIntelligence 5 shares and extends
the ArcGIS Server user accountability
system based on Microsoft SQL Server
 We use Microsoft Entity Framework to
access basic membership informations
and the extended user configuration
settings

13.  GeoIntelligence5 is fully based on Microsoft
Enterprise Library at infrastructure level to
manage cross-cutting concerns:
› Dependency Injection & Interception
› Logging
› Security
› Caching
› Validation
› Exception handling

14.  We decided to expose application
services in the same way ArcGIS Server
do: HTTP REST services
 Client-Side we can use the same
paradigm to access both ArcGIS services
and application services
 We decided to use Microsoft WCF REST
Services because of its no-configuration
capability and integration with ASP.NET

15.  GeoIntelligence5 is a plug-in based
system: user account configuration
contains the plug-in list available for that
user
 Managed Extensibility Framework is the
key factor technology in our plug-in
architecture in terms of single plug-in
deployment, runtime registration and
loading

16.  HTML5 client-side richness means we
have to face a large number of CSS and
Javascript files
 GeoIntelligence5 integrates Combres to
streamline client-side resources
optimization:
› Runtime minification
› Caching
› Reduced number of client requests

17.  We decided to use jQuery as main
Javascript support framework because
of:
› Wide adoption and documentation
› Great third parties plug-in avalaibility
› Simplicity
› Customization

18.  Linq is one of the most important
innovation in software development
 Querying arrays and objects (such as the
complex user configuration graph) is
very easy using Linq JS

19.  One of the most productive UI
presentation patterns is Model-View-
ViewModel
 Knockout JS is a complete M-V-VM
implementation in Javascript:
› Clean HTML markup
› Clear separation between UI and business
code
› Simple databinding mechanism

20. Roberto Messora
Marco Brugna