Angular2 + ESRI JS 4.2 = A world of endless possibilities

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01-13-2017 07:06 AM

Angular2 + ESRI JS 4.2 = A world of endless possibilities

Summary

An application developed with the Angular2 framework and the ESRI Javascript 4.2 api which helps the largest network utilities company in The Netherlands to reduce downtime, maintenance costs and keeps 3 million customers satisfied.

Techniques used: Angular2, ESRI JS Api 4.2, Webpack, HTML5, CSS3, Node.js, ArcGIS Server.

Abstract

The largest gas and electric network utilities company in The Netherlands is responsible for the distribution of energy such as electricity, (bio)gas and heat. The company maintains 80.000km of electricity cable, 43.000km of gaspipes and is responsible for delivering energy to 3 million consumers and businesses.

One of the biggest challenges the company faces is to keep maintenance time and costs down and keep the customer satisfaction rate as high as possible. This is an enormous challenge, because more than 90 percent of all assets are located underground and digging them up for maintenance and is a time and money consuming operation and causes a lot of downtime which results in a massive amount of complaints bringing customer satisfaction to an ultimate low.

The only way to accomplish this is to provide the networkmanagers of the company with useful insights based on (realtime) data directly from the energy networks. And that’s where Angular2 and ESRI JS 4 are coming in. The common BI-tools are incapable of providing useful insights, so we’ve created a brand new GEO-BI-tool that’s the starting point of a whole new generation of tools capable of handling big data in web applications and providing useful insights to the right people where needed. We are leading in combining and applying both techniques to create this type of applications. With the application networkmanagers have the insights needed to plan maintenance projects in a much more cost and time efficient way than ever before, causing economic advantages for the company and customers what creates a steep increase in customer satisfaction rates.

Developing the GEO-BI-application in Angular2 and ESRI JS 4 has a lot of advantages. First of all, Angular2 makes use of Typescript which enables developers to create a clean and efficient codebase. A great relief compared to Vanilla JavaScript and other frameworks who aren’t based on this superset of JavaScript. But the great ease of developing that Angular2 provides is just one of the advantages, but certainly not the only one. The separation of Models and Views enables frontend-/UX-designers and developers to work simultaneously on the project. Besides that the application is highly scalable. Developing new functionality is made easy as pie. Automated testing is quite easy to setup and it makes the testers very happy.

And last, but not least: The integration with the ESRI JS 4 api is great! It’s such a joy to work with a combination of the framework and the api. It just works, as simple as that.

With all those benefits the choice of JavaScript framework for developing this complex GEO-BI-application fell on Angular2.

This session will dive into Angular2 and highlights challenges we’ve encountered in developing this GEO-BI-application.

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