This is a huge step for the Cesium team at AGI (and for me and Hannah personally since it’s been our main focus for the better part of 2 years). I’m happy to answer any questions you may have, just reply to this thread. Additionally, if you’re really excited about our plans, you can email me directly via mamato@agi.com.
We’ll be posting additional information on a regular basis (and hopefully a development roadmap soon).
Am I correct that Cesium.com is an AGI-hosted SAAS setup, and that anything created through Composer will be hosted and served by Cesium.com?
Will there be a way to export Composer projects into a more “standalone” environment, either in terms of hosting or code development?
The “REST API” section says: “For developers, the processing, hosting, and analytical capabilities that power cesium.com will also be available as a set of REST services for use in custom applications (Cesium-based or otherwise). Almost anything you can do on cesium.com will also be available programmatically through the API.” Are those APIs also directly hosted on Cesium.com, and/or will they be available in a self-hosted format?
What sort of usage limits are there on the services?
Will Cesium.com offer the ability to upload terrain datasets and convert to quantized-mesh, and download the resulting tiles for self-hosting?
What’s the client-side tech stack behind the new site?
Matt,
This is a huuuuge step forward, a future to believe in!
Congratulations to you and Hannah on breaking ground!
“developing a suite of 3D geospatial analysis tools for generating viewsheds and terrain profiles, and adding screen overlays and map legends”.
I was just telling a colleague yesterday, discussing ESRI’s plans to replace ArcGIS Desktop with ArcGIS Pro, that Cesium is 3 years ahead of ArcGIS Pro as a 3D GIS data viewer, but without any of the analysis tools, nor many of the UI features, (nor the native shapefile support), that ArcGIS users expect.
Cesium Composer appears to have the potential of replacing ArcGIS OnLine for many purposes - AND IN 3D!!!
Am I correct that Cesium.com is an AGI-hosted SAAS setup, and that anything created through Composer will be hosted and served by Cesium.com?
The “REST API” section says: “For developers, the processing, hosting, and analytical capabilities that power cesium.com will also be available as a set of REST services for use in custom applications (Cesium-based or otherwise). Almost anything you can do on cesium.com will also be available programmatically through the API.” Are those APIs also directly hosted on Cesium.com, and/or will they be available in a self-hosted format?
During our beta period, cesium.com users will be able to upload data, create projects and access data via the API all hosted and served from cesium.com. However, we are also going to offer an on-premises solution once things are ready.
Will there be a way to export Composer projects into a more “standalone” environment, either in terms of hosting or code development?
We did talk about being able to export projects from the composer, but I think that is more of a long term goal. Right now, when you’re finished creating a project in the Composer you will be able to generate a shareable link for others to see your project in a viewer.
What sort of usage limits are there on the services?
I’ll let Matt answer this one, he knows those details better than I do.
Will Cesium.com offer the ability to upload terrain datasets and convert to quantized-mesh, and download the resulting tiles for self-hosting?
Yes, this is functionality we are working on integrating as we speak =)
What’s the client-side tech stack behind the new site?
We created a single page application using the Durandal framework. It uses knockout for data binding and automatic UI refreshing, so that was a natural choice for us since we were familiar with knockout from using it to implement Cesium’s widgets. We’re also using using Bootstrap for styling. We love to support open source, and both the client and server side rely on a number of open source projects. You can see a full list here: https://beta.cesium.com/opensource
Thanks Jon!
We’re really excited to hear feedback and learn about what other kind of features people would like to see integrated with the service and the Cesium Composer.
For this initial round we’re focusing on terrain and imagery, but we have a huge backlog of ideas and features we want to add. This will eventually include support for data formats like GeoJSON, KML and shapefiles.
Thanks for the interest! Hannah covered most of your questions fairly well, but I’ll try to fill in some extra details. Obviously nothing is set in stone and answers will change as we hear from the community.
Am I correct that Cesium.com is an AGI-hosted SAAS setup, and that anything created through Composer will be hosted and served by Cesium.com?
The “REST API” section says: “For developers, the processing, hosting, and analytical capabilities that power cesium.com will also be available as a set of REST services for use in custom applications (Cesium-based or otherwise). Almost anything you can do on cesium.com will also be available programmatically through the API.” Are those APIs also directly hosted on Cesium.com, and/or will they be available in a self-hosted format?
In addition to the hosted cesium.com (which is on AWS infrastructure), we’ll have on premises/enterprise solutions for self-hosting and possibly private hosted solutions (via the AWS marketplace). We’re still exploring our options here and feedback from the community will help drive priority. We’re developing on all 3 major platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux).
Will there be a way to export Composer projects into a more “standalone” environment, either in terms of hosting or code development?
Ultimately, yes, but the exact details haven’t been decided yet. We’ll have data export (i.e. export this specific terrain dataset) before we have full project export.
What sort of usage limits are there on the services?
While not finalized, our current strategy is that the only limitation is the size of the source data uploaded. Number of API calls or how much data you download will not affect pricing. So if you have an account that allows 100GB of data, you can upload as much raw imagery, terrain, vector data, models, etc… as you want up to 100GB, but you won’t gain lose any features/converters for being on a 10GB or 500GB plans (exact quotas still TBA). It’s a flat monthly/yearly rate. I’m sure the beta will help us evaluate how well this strategy works in practice but our goal is to keep pricing simple and easy to understand.
In addition to subscription level, we plan to have a marketplace of curated data that will be available for subscription. Lots of it will be free, but certain curated datasets (either created by us or provided by new business partners) will be available for a monthly or yearly fee. We again hope to have this be flat rate pricing, but that might have to depend on the exact data product. Exact details here are a lot less clear, but expect to hear more as it solidifies in the coming months.
What’s the client-side tech stack behind the new site?
We’re hoping to have a full breakdown of our stack in a future blog post (hopefully one of many regarding cesium.com). It could be considered old-school my many people, but we’re solving hard data and visualization problems, so the goal was to have a tried and true tech stack to build on first.
Will we be able to access public TLE sets via Cesium.com; ex. add the ISS to a scenario or grab this data for an external web site via REST? If so, that would be cool. If not, please consider.
Those types of (traditionally AGI) space-based features aren’t what we are concentrating on for our initial feature set. The good news is that it’s definitely on our long-term radar and I would love to provide them one day.
As an aside, if you have some specific needs you are looking to fill sooner rather than later, I can point you to other people at AGI who may be able to help. Shoot me an email (mamato@agi.com) if you’re interested.
