Web Services Education Gap

According to a recent article ("Lack of Skilled Devs Slows Web Services") in Integration Developer News, a lack of skilled developers is hampering the adoption of web services in the enterprise. Development managers are having a hard time finding people who understand the various specifications and the ways to build the interfaces.

Based on a study by Evans Data Corporation, the article indicates that developers are having trouble with technologies such as XML Schema and XML DTDs, and points out that writing these can require considerable experience.

In the same way that a good writer must usually spends a lot of time reading, we'd like to suggest that aspring web services developers use the various Amazon Web Services as learning tools. After you've built a real application using the E-Commerce Service, the Alexa Web Information Service or the Simple Queue Service, you have some legitimate web services experience. This experience may come in handy on the job, and it certainly won't hurt to add it to your resume. You can also study the DTDs and Schemas associated with these services to see some examples of how they are built.

Comments

[Gil Shalit]

I've tried to post this to the discusion board at least three times, but after pressing the post button, IE returns an 'Invalid page' error. And the webservices@amazon.com email link returns an - 'Email unknown' messgae... So I hope you don't mind if I post this here. It does have some relevance to the educational gap...

I'm trying to use the Alexa webservice, and have adapted one of Elena's samples, as I can not find any specific code samples for AWIS. I'm using VB.Net 2005 beta. Here is what I have (questions after code):

Dim awis As New com.amazon.aws_beta.AWSAlexa

Dim cat_listing As New com.amazon.aws_beta.CategoryListingsRequest

Dim cat_listings(1) As com.amazon.aws_beta.CategoryListingsRequest

Dim cat_search As New com.amazon.aws_beta.CategoryListings

Dim cat_response As com.amazon.aws_beta.CategoryListingsResponse

cat_listing.Path = "Top\Arts\Animation"

cat_listing.Recursive = "True"

cat_listing.ResponseGroup = "Listings"

cat_listing.SortBy = "Popularity"

cat_listing.Start = "1"

cat_listing.Count = "25"

cat_listing.Descriptions = "true"

cat_listings = New com.amazon.aws_beta.CategoryListingsRequest() {cat_listing}

cat_search.SubscriptionId = "12WN3MD89J9JM5HJY982"

cat_search.Request = cat_listings

cat_response = awis.CategoryListings(cat_search)

1) How do I get the results out of the response object?

2) I sthis thecorrect approach?

3) Are there any up to date VB.Net samples or XSL sheets? The XSL posted in the blog seem out of date...

Thanks

Gil