(I hope this is a valid question)
As I stated in my title, I'm looking for a fairly easy to moderately easy idea for some sort of online raster analysis map. I'm familiar with ESRI and their really awesome API, as I'm hoping to tackle something on that front. I'm also open to using the mapstraction lib.
Does anyone have any ideas for me?
Thanks!!
I'm not sure you mean image rasters or data rasters. This uses open source packages: MapServer and an AJAX client MsCross. It generates data rasters on the server and displays them in the browser. The rasters are contour plots for a plume of contamination in groundwater.
You do unfortunately not write, what exactly you need. Do you want to display maps on a web page or in a application?
In the latter case i would recommend using http://www.openstreetmap.org/ it seems to be a little tricky in the beginning, buts data base gets better and better. A number of renderes exist, which you can integrate into your application.
If you are already familiar with ESRI, then you should look at the ESRI Flex API ESRI Javascript API. You can use both of them to fire up Server side Geoprocessing services.
There are so many ways to skin the cat...
You may want to check the Publishing a GeoProcessing Service section of ESRI help
The basic idea is this... you use ArcMap/ArcCatalog to author a Geoprocessing Model (I am assuming you are familiar with this), which you later expose in an ArcGIS Server as a Geoprocessing Service. Publishing a model as a service is pretty easy provided you already have an ArcGIS Server configured - see the links I provided you above.
Then you can either use the free ArcGIS Explorer application to consume that GeoProcessing Service or write a webapp using Flex, or Javascript or DotNet or even python to consume that webservice.
And yeah, don't consume the webservice synchronously - stick with async.