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Peter
Drayton Cool, Amazon releases
their a
web service API! Interfaces to the Amazon API are
an rpc/encoded SOAP endpoint described with WSDL and a raw XML over
HTTP endpoint described using XML schemas & prose. Savvy move.
There are already some quite interesting uses of the API: BookWatch
combines RSS, the Google API and the Amazon API; and
Similarities Graph which creates diagrams of the
similarities between books. For example, check out the
Similarities Graph for C#
Essentials. One thing I noticed was that both the WSDL
and XSDs type everything as string
even if a more specific schema type exists. For example, in the
SOAP API /Details/ImageUrlSmall is
typed as xs:string, I would have
expected this to be xs:anyURI. Any
thoughts on why they chose this route? Presumably they
took the least common denominator approach for maximum
interop. Clearly we need to add anyURI to our SOAPBuilders
list. Also cool to see
AmazonWebServices\JavaCodeSample\client.axis.sh
in the toolkit. Apparently they tested the same source
code with both Sun's JAX PAK and Apache Axis; and they have a
Perl client using SOAP::Lite.