Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Amazon API. 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 creates diagrams of the similarities between books. For fun, check out the Similarities Graph for C# Essentials. When looking at the API one thing I noticed was 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? [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I would also love to see the date of release to be typed as date, but I agree with Sam: they took the least common denominator (LCD) approach to maximize interop. I just wonder, when will be the time when we don't need to think about LCD to interop? Seems like I still have a lot of work to do with SOAP::Lite.
Posted to services @ 8:48:43 AM ()
Copyright (C) 2002 Paul Kulchenko
Updated 8/22/2002; 5:32:17 PM
