JavaOne: TS-5958: Amazon Web Services
Terms:
- AWS - Amazon Web Service
- ASIN - Amazon Standard Item Number
- Associate ID - pass this # into all AWS calls
- REST - Representational State Transfer
- support for industry standards
- remote access to data and functionality
- about getting direct access to guts of website
- APIs that give any developer outside of amazon programmatic access to Amazon's data and technology.
- Includes product information, customer-created content, shopping cart, etc.
- Legitimize outside access, site scraping sucks
- Third-party developers extend the Amazon platform
- Harness creativity of others
- SOAP API
- REST API
- XSLT transformation service - can apply transform to XML results before returned. Can build website with no physical template, just supply XSLT stylesheet, in order to build "virtual website".
- WSDL - documentation for schemas
- Tons of documentation & community outreach
- SOAP is standard, strongly typed, requires toolkit
- REST is convention, ad hoc, easy ramp-up, prototype in browser, really easy to use. Key-value pair based. Easy to script. Develop in browser.
- REST is about 80% used, SOAP other 20%.
- http://www.amazon.com/webservices
- developer blog: http://aws.typepad.com
- download documentation
- Amazon offers 3 different things via web services API
- Easy to use via Java
- WebServices is like an API for specific websites, allowing 3rd party developers to build new sorts of apps just like if you were to write an app for the Windows API.
