In this tutorial I am going to give you a gentle introduction to network programming in Python. If you are new to programming or new to Python then that may seem like a daunting thought. But read on and you will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is.

Like most modern programming languages, Python was designed for networking from the very beginning, and thanks to that, a lot of the networking tasks you would want to accomplish with the language are made a whole lot easier.

Network communication is a large topic, but if it is something that interests you then read on because in this tutorial I will show you how to download a web page. I will show you how easy Python makes tasks like this.

Take a look at the following code:

import urllib
	
con = urllib.urlopen("http://hartmannsoftware.com")
page = con.read()
con.close()
print page

I suspect that many of you are familiar with the term "hard coding a value" whereby the age of an individual or their location is written into the condition (or action) of a business rule (in this case) as shown below:

if customer.age > 21 and customer.city == 'denver'

then ...

Such coding practices are perfectly expectable provided that the conditional values, age and city, never change. They become entirely unacceptable if a need for different values could be anticipated. A classic example of where this practice occurred that caused considerable heartache in the IT industry was the Y2K issue where dates were updated using only the last 2 digits of a four digit number because the first 2 digits were hard-coded to 19 i.e. 1998, 1999. All was well provided that the date did not advance to a time beyond the 1900’s since no one could be certain of what would happen when the millennia arrived (2000). A considerably amount of work (albeit boring) and money, approximately $200 billion, went into revising systems by way of software rewrites and computer chip replacements in order to thwart any detrimental outcomes. It is obvious how a simple change or an assumption can have sweeping consequences.

You may wonder what Y2K has to do with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). Well, what if we considered rules themselves to be hard-coded. If we were to write 100s of rules in Java, .NET or whatever language that only worked for a given scenario or assumption, would that not constitute hard-coded logic? By hard-coded, we obviously mean compiled. For example, if a credit card company has a variety of bonus campaigns, each with their own unique list of rules that may change within a week’s time, what would be the most effective way of writing software to deal with these responsibilities?

Facebook has recently released a collection of C++ software modules that it uses to run the popular website.  With Facebook releasing Folly (the name it designated for the collection), more of the internal programs could become open source since they need different parts of the collection.

Jordan DeLong, a Facebook software engineer, said one concerning holdup to releasing additional work is that any open source project had to cut away from the dependencies on non-released internal collection code.

IT Outsourcing came to foray as a means for corporations to focus on critical business operations while having a specialized IT company take over the responsibility of managing the IT infrastructure and application development. For corporations especially in the developed countries, IT outsourcing provided two fold advantages, one was access to a highly talented pool of engineers and that too at a lower cost since countries like India were quickly growing their stature as an IT outsourcing hub.

IT Outsourcing is now as mainstream as ever and almost every leading organization outsources some or all parts of its IT infrastructure to a specialized company. It makes pure business sense and with tightening budget controls, IT outsourcing has become one of the strategic cost reduction driver for most organizations. Moreover, IT outsourcing is no more restricted to companies in USA & Europe outsourcing their IT projects to countries like India. Domestic companies within India itself actively use IT outsourcing including the Indian government like the India Post project given to TCS.

Is it then a no brainer that IT Outsourcing is critical to your business? Well, if it is cheaper and does not seem to have any inherent disadvantages why not!! Not really, IT Outsourcing despite proven benefits has its limitations and you should be cognizant be of the same before considering outsourcing your IT operations.

·         Limitations in estimating the actual cost of IT outsourcing:Let’s tackle the biggest driver of IT Outsourcing-Cost Savings. For anyone to estimate the cost savings from IT Outsourcing one needs to be able to predict the cost of outsourcing which then helps understand the cost savings from the same. Yes, at a higher level it is a matter of a simple $ per man-hour costs and IT outsourcing will appear to be cheaper in almost all cases. However, “hidden costs” are commonplace with IT outsourcing and it can be immensely difficult to accurately predict these hidden costs. For example, you need to be able to identify the costs of transitioning your in-house IT to an outsourcer, management overhead needed to manage the outsourcing relationship etc. In addition, IT outsourcing contracts are fixed at the start of the contract and as a result any additional requirement/change tends to be charged additionally. It is no surprise that IT requirements can change frequently and if your outsourcing contract doesn’t account for flexibility, you might be limited in the actual cost savings you might make. There is no surprise that there have been so many instances of IT outsourcing projects overshooting their budgets by a huge margin such as the one government shared services project going 500 million pounds over budget