AWS News Blog

Monday Medley

Voiced by Polly

It’s a beautiful spring morning here in Seattle, and I’ve got a metric ton of interesting stuff to share with you today:

  • The Programmable Web site has been revised and now includes a number of dynamic features. The home page includes a new mashups dashboard. There’s also a mashups dashboard, an API dashboard, and the ever-cool Mashup Matrix.
  • In a convenient display of symmetry, the Wikipedia now has an AWS entry, and there’s now a Wiki built entire within Amazon’s S3. The S3 Wiki is implemented entirely with client-side JavaScript served up from S3; all of the content is also stored in S3. As a commenter notes on the wiki, “This thing is surprisingly fast.” Leslie Orchard explains how it all works. This is a model that some smart people are now calling Client-SOA. Or to put it another way: “Servers? We don’t need no stinkin’ servers!”
  • Speaking of S3, Jason Kolb expects it to be big in the enterprise, although Tim Anderson is a bit skeptical.
  • Various S3 projects continue to move ahead. S3Dav was updated last week, as was  #Sh3ll> (sharp-shell) and BitBucket. Brian Sutherland is adding S3 support to the GNU Duplicity backup tool.
  • Jim Culbert has released the first version of SWS — Simple Web Sharing — “A small Windows application that takes advantage of Amazons S3 service and some simple Ajax to implement basic desktop sharing.” Available in both VB6 and .Net versions.
  • The Ajaxian blog has a nice review of some S3 JavaScript bindings.
  • Tom Copeland covers an important S3-related issue: How to set the MIME type on an S3 object so that the browser will treat the object as a downloadable file.
  • Lest someone think that this blog is solely devoted to S3, we’ve got Artie, a little application to fetch cover art from ECS. While we are on the subject of cover art, it occurs to me that some clever developer could combine cover art with the JavaScript Rotating Cube to produce something very cool.
  • The Manageability blog talks about some Principles of Loosely Coupled APIs. Not totally unrelated is Dion Hinchliffe’s comparison of the minimalist search-box model found on many web sites to the command line. At some very fundamental layer, there’s something very important going on here.
  • Oh yeah, and Matt Croydon cleaned up his office (something way overdue for me), and found his AWS developer registration from July of 2002. Nice going, Matt, you were one of the first!

That’s all I’ve got this morning.

— Jeff;

Modified 2/9/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Jeff Barr

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.