Author: Jeff Barr

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

We updated the ECS 3 service earlier today. Here are the details: Features and Fixes Duplicate product descriptions returned in Search operations Search operations no longer return duplicate product descriptions. Search operation with .mode=books. fail for CA locale As documented in our 3.0 SDK, users need to pass in the appropriate “mode=books-xx” parameter for intl […]

We updated the ECS 4 service earlier today. The new WSDL version is 2005-02-23. Here are the details: Features and Fixes Searching by European Article Number (EAN) is now supported for CA Searching by EAN is now supported in the CA locale for Classical, DVD, Music, Video and VHS SearchIndices. New element, URLEncodedHMAC, is available […]

The new ECS-powered dealazon.com site displays the best deals (products with the highest discounts) from a number of Amazon categories, including Electronics, Kitchen, Toys, Tools, Books, Music, DVDs,  and Jewelry & Watches. The site also offers RSS feeds for each type of deal.