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Updated: 9/1/2002; 6:57:27 PM.
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Tuesday, July 16, 2002 |
Peter Drayton Cool, Amazon releases their a web service API! Interfaces to the Amazon API are an rpc/encoded SOAP endpoint described with WSDL and a raw XML over HTTP endpoint described using XML schemas & prose. Savvy move. There are already some quite interesting uses of the API: BookWatch combines RSS, the Google API and the Amazon API; and Similarities Graph which creates diagrams of the similarities between books. For example, check out the Similarities Graph for C# Essentials. One thing I noticed was that both the WSDL and XSDs type everything as string even if a more specific schema type exists. For example, in the SOAP API /Details/ImageUrlSmall is typed as xs:string, I would have expected this to be xs:anyURI. Any thoughts on why they chose this route? Presumably they took the least common denominator approach for maximum interop. Clearly we need to add anyURI to our SOAPBuilders list. Also cool to see AmazonWebServicesJavaCodeSampleclient.axis.sh in the toolkit. Apparently they tested the same source code with both Sun's JAX PAK and Apache Axis; and they have a Perl client using SOAP::Lite.
6:20:34 PM 
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