Amazon.com Web Services 3.0

Rating:
Summary: This will get you going
Review: Aimed squarely at developers, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Development Kit (SDK) gives you everything you need to get started developing applications that uses the AWS (everything, that is, except the developer's token which you can generate from the link on the product page).

A good understanding of Web Services is expected of the reader. If most of the terms XML, XML/HTTP, SOAP, XSLT, XML Schema, DTD, and WSDL leave you puzzled, then you need to read up on this topic first.

Most people downloading this kit will be web developers intending to use the services on their web sites, but the AWS kit is useful for all applications, including stand-alone applications and desktop integrations (e.g. you could integrate it with Microsoft Word to complete and maintain a bibliography for your thesis).

You should have familiarity with whatever development environment you choose. The kit contains examples in Java and perl, and has sample requests and responses, both for SOAP and XML/HTTP. However, most development environments, including Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, are full supported through SOAP and WSDL.

There are also examples on how to use the XSLT service, which is probably the easiest way for many to get started with the AWS.

The kit contains documentation in Microsoft Word and HTML formats. The documentation is somewhat terse, and describes the format of the calls to the Web Services. However, it omits any detailed description of the returned data structures and values, and it misses many useful functions (for example how to add multiple items to the Amazon shopping cart).

In summary, this kit will enable you to develop both traditional applications and web sites that use the Amazon Web Services. However, the documentation is terse and has a number of omissions, and some of the examples (e.g. perl) contains broken code, so realistically you'd want to participate in the developer forum (full instructions are in the kit and on the Amazon web site). The forum is friendly and active; it contains many examples of how to use AWS in a multitude of development languages and on a wide variety of platforms, and has a user-contributed Frequently Asked Questions list.

Good effort by Amazon and I appreciate the need to get the documentation out in a reasonable time, but for the next release we hope for more complete documentation, working examples, and examples for more languages. Three stars.