Author: Jeff Barr

Earlier today we rolled out Amazon S3, our reliable, highly scalable, low-latency data storage service. Using SOAP and REST interfaces, developers can easily store any number of blocks of data in S3. Each block can be up to 5 GB in length, and is associated with a user-defined key and additional key/value metadata pairs. Further, […]

If you need to create signed requests to AWIS or other Amazon web services and you are using JavaScript, this JavaScript MD5 code may be handy. Update: Adam Kennedy notes that there’s another similar module, Digest::MD5. This module is part of the JavaScript Archive Network (JSAN) – not to be confused with JSON, the JavaScript […]

We’ve just rolled out the new AWS Developer Connection, featuring lots and lots of developer-oriented information including code samples, technical documentation, and release notes, all organized on a per-service basis. The new online community environment is browsable and searchable, so you can easily find what you are looking for. — Jeff;

We’ve just rolled out some enhancements to the Mechanical Turk API; the new API version is 2006-01-16. New features include the use of HIT Types to simplify the process of creating new HITs, better handling of reviewable HITs, the ability to update a Qualification test, and additional information provided to the Requester as part of […]

Users of MrRat‘s venerable Amazon Products Feed can now add price comparison features using the services at Price-Compare.net . — Jeff;

Earlier today I spent some time using Hit-Builder.com and found myself very impressed with the site and with what I was able to accomplish. The site implements a complete, requester-oriented interface to the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using Hit Builder, it is possible to create and issue a series of HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) with just […]

From The Programmable Web comes word of ISBNdb.com, a large database of  books indexed by ISBN. Of interest to developers is the fact that there is a complete (and free) REST API. Items in the site are organized (and accessible) via book, subject, category, author, and publisher index. Several (ok, many) ECS developers have asked […]

Ajax Magazine is running a multi-part series on the use of PHP and Ajax to create an AWS-powered application: Part 1 is already up. It creates a basic site with dynamic search functionality. Part 2 adds price  comparison across the 6 Amazon sites supported by ECS. Part 3 adds browsing functionality. Part 4 adds a […]

Time to update our speaking & conference calendar. Amazon will be speaking and/or exhibiting at each of the following conferences: March 7th – O’Reilly Etech, San Diego, California March 13-14th – Next Generation Web International Conference, Seoul Korea March 13th-17th – SD Expo, Santa Clara, California March 20-22nd – Microsoft Mix06, Las Vegas, Nevada March […]

Over at Ask Metafilter, a questioner asks “When you imagine XSLT transformations happening in your mind’s eye, what does it look like?” This is a very powerful question to ask, because ancient, procedurally oriented developers like me sometimes have trouble following the non-linear, pattern-driven processing that takes place when an XSLT template is applied to […]