AWS News Blog

Jeff Barr

Author: Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.

Major Updates at AWZone

There are a number of new features over at the AWS Zone: The three scratchpads (SOAP, REST, and Code) have been combined in to a single universal scratchpad. Support for France and Canada has been added. The international scratchpads now support code generation. Upgraded to use the newest WSDL (2005-03-23) and the new features therein. […]

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Updated ECS Release

We updated the ECS 3 and ECS 4 services earlier this week. The new WSDL version is 2005-03-23. Here are the release notes: New Features New SearchIndices ECS announces support for new search indices – Toys in DE and Pet Supplies in US. Please refer to the API Reference section of the documentation for Search […]

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Amaztype

The Amaztype application uses Amazon cover art to create a visual representation of any word, using titles which match that word. Very cool, requires Flash. Click on the background to zoom in, and hover the cursor over any cover to view more details.

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XML Shell

The XML Shell allows command-line users to interactively query and manipulate XML data without writing any code. Written in Perl, the tool allows you to use a combination of Perl and XPath syntax to treat XML data structures as if they were genuine Perl objects. You can also navigate through the XML data hierarchy using […]

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XML Tips and Tricks

Courtesy of our friends over at IBM’s DeveloperWorks site comes this collection of XML Tips and Tricks. Near the bottom of that page, you can find some very worthwhile articles on the use of XSLT, including a tip on the use of XSLT to create lookup tables, along with the followup on defaults and error […]

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XML Editors

If you work with data from ECS (or any of the other Amazon services, for that matter) you may want to consider using an XML editor. Here’s an article about open source XML editors. If you are looking for a commercial product, consider Altova’s XML Spy.

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Zuggest — Dynamic Amazon Query

Francis Shanahan has developed Zuggest, a novel approach to searching the Amazon catalog. Simply enter your query, and Zuggest will make a call to ECS every couple of seconds and update the display accordingly. Zuggest is an example of a so-called “Ajax” application, using a combination of asynchronous calls to ECS and direct processing of […]

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