Author: Jeff Barr

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;

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 […]

Kevin Daily offers a brief thought on REST vs. SOAP in the case of the Amazon Web Services. We are still seeing an 80% REST / 20% SOAP usage pattern. Kevin correctly notes that the ease with which developers can invoke an XSLT transformation as the concluding step in a REST request makes for easier […]

Have you ever needed to get an answer to a question in a hurry, perhaps something that you can’t find in your favorite search engine? If so, you may want to tap into the internet-scale Mechanical Turk workforce using the new question asking system at Ask For Cents. To get an answer in a hurry, […]