I have heard of people using the ESRI Javascript API to create webmaps with spatial data from SQL Server or other RDBMS's. From what I can tell, they are not using ArcGIS Server as a middleware. In particular, I recently heard of a company that uses a SQL Server database with spatial types and Entity Framework to link the database to the app, but then they are using the ESRI JS API on the front end to render the data.
This is something that really interests me as I have worked with SQL Server, Entity Framework, ASP.Net, and the JS API separately and I do not have access to ArcGIS Server. Does anyone know of a particular architecture or workflow for simply using the JS API as a front end for a non ESRI backend?
FeatureLayer
objects? RIght now I am working on a project using ArcGIS Online and JS API. The problem is that I can't do any processing in AGOL so any calculations must be done client side. I'm working with only a few layers, but some of them could have hundreds of thousands of features.