The Amazon Web Services (http://www.amazon.com/aws) is a whole family of web services for a variety of Amazon products. Among the products Amazon offers is a virtual computing service, a digital storage service, and a messaging queue service (and you thought they just sold DVDs and books...). Some of their services are fee-based like their historical pricing data, while others, like their Alexa Web Service, are free or free for a certain number of requests. Not surprisingly, Amazon has a free web service for their traditional ecommerce products like books and DVDs, called their Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS).
Architecturally, the web services are available as either REST or SOAP. According to Amazon’s Chief Web Services Evangelist, Jeff Barr, 85% of their web service developers use their REST services. Later, we will look at SOAP for another mashup, but for now, we will join that 85% and use the simpler REST service.
The ECS is what we will be looking at. Before we get started...