@ChrisW Hi Chris! I am wondering if there is a way to interface with ArcGIS to get a list of coordinates that make up the drive state polygon, based on a location. We want to be able to show the drive state polygon in one of our web applications.

@ChrisW My company currently has a license for the desktop. One of our GIS guys pointed me to the network-extension, which he showed me a UI that allowed him to click on a point to see a drive time polygon. Not sure if there is a way to call on this from another web application though. Like maybe a way to receive a list of JSON coordinates that make up the polygon.

@mattblang The short answer is yes, but it's going to be more complicated than that. It sounds like he was showing you a Network Analyst Service Area solver. Given a network data set, you can input a point and create (with a few options) polygons representing the area reachable in a certain amount of time. Those polygons can then be exported for permanance. In short there's an analysis being run there.

Esri has an online network analysis service: esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline/credits/network-analysis but of course it costs. I'm sure there's some way to create your own service, but that would be beyond me. If you're wanting to just look at specific points, the analysis could be run on desktop and then polygons exported, converted, etc. But if you're wanting a user to click anywhere in your map and get a polygon, that's going to require some sort of back-end network analysis.

You might be able to format this into a question on GIS.SE - you'll get a lot more exposure there in terms of answers. There are already a couple of relevant questions if you do a search on "online network analysis".

@ChrisW Thanks Chris! I will definitely format this as a question. I wouldn't need a real-time generation service, I think we could just store the polygons in a cache. But the creation of the polygon would need to be automated in some way when the user of our web application creates an object in our system.