Author: Jeff Barr

I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to present at the first-ever meeting of Ignite Seattle this past December. This event attracted lots of Seattle-area technical folks for an evening that was both fun and informative. We started out the evening by forming into teams to build bridges from popsicle sticks and hot glue. […]

I received a call for help via LinkedIn early this morning: How can I find a developer familiar with Amazon’s API for a mashup I’m planning? We don’t have a formal way to make these connections right now, but the answers to this question are certainly interesting and thought-provoking. Among other things, we’ve thought about […]

Welcome to 2007 everyone. I’ve got all kinds of cool stuff queued up in my inbox. Let’s start out with a couple of mashup notes. First, long-time AWS developer Francis Shanahan‘s new book, Amazon Mashups, is now shipping. Weighing in at a hefty 408 pages, the book will show you how to combine Amazon data […]

My team and I have been working to put together our plans for the first quarter of 2007. Here’s what we have so far: January 15th-16th – Mashup University, Boston, MA. 16th – Access Developers Group, Redmond, WA. 17th-18th – Mashup Camp, Boston, MA. 17th – Vancouver BC .Net User’s Group, Vancouver, BC. 26th-27th – […]

A number of great web applications are built on top of Amazon services such as ECS, EC2 or S3. In fact, 3 of Amazon’s services are listed in a recent Linux World article, Ten Web 2.0 APIs You Can Really Use. Here are a few cool Amazon-powered applications that have caught my eye: Social bookmarking […]

Years and years ago I made a casual (yet accurate) remark to Tim O’Reilly about the relative use of our SOAP and REST web services. At that time REST accounted for something like 85% of our usage. Tim blogged our conversation, which was subsequently picked up by Slashdot. It’s been fun to see this casual […]

A new version of the Mechanical Turk Getting Started Guide is now available. This all-new document includes code samples in 6 programming languages: Java with SOAP C# with SOAP Perl with REST PHP with REST Python with REST and SOAP Ruby with REST and SOAP The samples are also available in the downloads section of […]

Jonathan Boutelle gave a talk about scalable web architectures at a Bar Camp in Bangalore. His talk focused on how he and his team built Slideshare, including their use of Amazon S3 and Ruby on Rails. Jonanthan’s blog post includes a copy of his presentation (stored in Slideshare, naturally enough) and a video of the […]

A new release of ECS 4.0 was rolled out earlier today. There are two new features: A new response group, OfferListings, was added for all locales. This response group returns somewhat lighter version of the data provided by the Offers group. Data for the French locale now includes the French waste tax. — Jeff;

Ruby got a new face-lift with the new Rails framework. I was always fascinated with the Ruby language. 25 lines of Java code gets shrunk to 4 lines of equivalent Ruby code plus its more readable. And with Rails, it gets a new kick. It is always impressive to hear people say “I am a […]