Specifications

SOLUTIONS
G
iving away the store is usually
bad business, but Amazon Web
Services (
AWS ) considers this its
mission statement. Amazon.com debuted
AWS in July 2002, announcing that the
service would use
XML-based Web ser-
vices technology to make the contents of
its multimillion-item catalog freely avail-
able for use by any Web site or software
application.
Since then, Amazon.com has devoted
significant resources to exposing not only
product descriptions, images, and pric-
ing, but also customer ratings, reviews,
product recommendations, shopping cart
functions, and chat rooms.
The project is among the most visible
examples of Web services, a much-touted
yet inscrutable technology that promises
a more automated Web.
AWS has been
publishing, promoting, and supporting a
series of application programming inter-
faces (
APIs), free tools, and a support site
within Amazon.com to help developers
use its data. In the process, Amazon has
registered more than 30,000 program-
mers (and would-be programmers) in its
AWS developers program.
There’s business logic behind this
largesse.
AWS is an outgrowth of the long-
standing Amazon.com Associates pro-
gram, which pays bloggers, Webmasters,
and online retailers commissions on sales
generated by the “Buy Now!” buttons on
their sites. Amazon.com won’t disclose
exact revenue figures or discuss the re-
turn on investment for its Web services
efforts. But it hopes
AWS will encourage
special-interest Web sites, shopping and
specialty-retail sites, and application de-
velopers to share the wealth by tailoring
Amazon.com shopping tools for their re-
spective audiences.
For instance, a fan site for The White
Stripes could use
AWS
to fetch album art-
work and track listings for its discogra-
phy page. Visitors could click cover im-
ages to buy
CDs, but sales commissions
wouldn’t be the only payoff. Rigging the
page to display all results of an
AWS artist
search on White Stripes would make page
updates unnecessary: New albums would
automatically be added to the page as
soon as Amazon.com added them to its
catalog.
AWS is also hoping to encourage the
use of Amazon content in ways the par-
ent company would never have been able
to develop on its own, says Colin Bryar,
director of Web services and associates at
Amazon.com. “There has been an eco-
nomic model for
AWS from the very start,
but the real goal is innovation.”
As evidence that this effort is working,
about 100 products are already available
from
AWS developers. Some of the more
creative ones include a keychain bar code
scanner from iPilot (www.ipilot.net) that
lets consumers capture bar code informa-
tion from books,
DVDs, and other in-
store merchandise, upload them to a
PC,
handheld, or cell phone, and instantly
get comparison pricing via
AWS. And
Cusimano.Com Corp.’s Association Engine
lets Amazon.com associates with no pro-
gramming expertise set up
AWS -powered
shopping pages or even full Web sites.
To give developers as much flexibility
as possible, Amazon.com decided from
the beginning that
AWS would support
both of the main development approach-
es to Web services—
XML (eXtensible
Markup Language) and
SOAP (Simple
Object Access Protocol). Both methods
exchange data in the form of
XML code
transported via Web-standard
HTTP (Hy-
perText Transfer Protocol). Using
XML
ensures that the data works on any com-
puting platform.
Web services data transfers are essen-
tially call-and-response exchanges. In the
case of
AWS, an associate site or a soft-
ware application calls an
AWS server with
a request for data—a specific catalog
entry or search results for a particular
keyword, for instance. After authenticat-
ing the request, the
AWS server issues an
XML-coded response.
A major driver of Web services’ popu-
larity among developers is the creative
flexibility they provide. Web services data
is highly structured in terms of definition
and function, but the developer has com-
plete discretion over what to display. For
instance, an Amazon.com associate might
fetch and cache all of Amazon’s digital-
camera listings to allow product searches
within his site, but limit searches to items
that receive customer ratings of three
stars or better.
Helping partner Web sites tailor con-
tent for their audiences may make Ama-
zon.com’s presence hard to notice, but
AWS will be happy to have its efforts rec-
ognized in Amazon.com’s bottom line.
Amazon Everywhere
With Web services technology, mini Amazon.coms are popping
up all over the Web. By Jim Akin
PC MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 www.pcmag.com
70
Tapping into Amazon
The 30,000 members of the Amazon Web Services developers’ program can use free tools to link their applications or
Web sites to Amazon’s vast catalog. This enables users to view content and buy products from Amazon without visiting
Amazon.com.
Catalog
database
layer
Visitor at camera hobbyist site
Show me all digital cameras
with high customer ratings.
Amazon
’s
XM
L/H
T
T
P
and
S
O
AP
processing la
y
e
r
Amazon
.com
Buy Now!
Request sent
via XML or SOAP
Other
products
Books
CDs
DVDs