Friday, September 26, 2003

Both sides of the IT outsourcing issue The linked InfoWorld article is a fairly good representation of both sides of the outsourcing U.S. IT jobs to other countries. I also have mixed feelings about large scale IT outsourcing - besides the obvious downward pressure on my own consulting rates, I worry that the U.S. will give up its competitive advantage in developing new technologies once competing countries develp a critical mass of technology. On the other hand, I do believe in globalization - doing work and manufacturing were it can be done least expensively - if third world country workers are not exploited and environmental concerns are addressed fairly. Like most issues, there are two reasonable sides to this argument. 8:18:13 AM

Using continuations in implementing web services I just ran across a month old blog by Chris Double on using continuations for implementing web services. Good stuff! (For Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme programmers mostly). 8:08:46 AM

Microsoft and IBM on web services In the last several years, I have have watched the growth of two technologies: web services and the semantic web. At least web services are taking off.... The linked article is a light weight media promotion by IBM and Microsoft - still, both companies get credit for supported standards like SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, etc. For Java programmers, Sun's Web Services Toolkit offers a complete software stack - one problem though is if you read the license agreement you will quickly notice that Sun does not give you the right to use their web services kit in commercial applications (you need to but their Sun ONE stuff). Again for Java programmers, the free version of GLUE from themindelectric.com and Apache Jakarta Tomcat with Axis provide kits that can be used commercially. 8:03:28 AM

© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson. Last update: 10/3/03; 10:21:32 AM.