Meanwhile, on the GIS servers

There is a lot going on while we were consuming these services; let us take a moment to explore that. All the work we have been doing—whether it was visualizing, editing, or analyzing—is being done on the GIS servers. The GIS servers eventually receive the REST or SOAP request and process it. For instance, we always used a URL to connect to the Server site in the visualization section. The Server site then determines, based on history, which GIS server from the list of machines registered to the site is available and forwards the request to it. The GIS server then processes the request: if the request was to zoom in to a particular parcel, the GIS server queries the geodatabase, fetches the data within that extent, and then draws the map based on the selected protocol or standard. Whether to return it as a PNG image, KML, or SOAP XML is all based on the specified protocol. It is important to note that when a user is trying to connect to a map service using a...