Amazon Web Services Blog

J2ME Midlet Using AWS (With Source)

Deepak Nadig has written a J2ME Midlet (Application) which uses AWS to display product prices on any Java-enabled cell phone. More details and complete source code can be found here.

Major Updates at AWZone

There are a number of new features over at the AWS Zone:

• The three scratchpads (SOAP, REST, and Code) have been combined in to a single universal scratchpad.
• Support for France and Canada has been added.
• The international scratchpads now support code generation.
• Upgraded to use the newest WSDL (2005-03-23) and the new features therein.

Thanks, Elena!

Updated ECS Release

We updated the ECS 3 and ECS 4 services earlier this week. The new WSDL version is 2005-03-23. Here are the release notes:

New Features

• New SearchIndices

  ECS announces support for new search indices - Toys in DE and Pet Supplies in US. Please refer to the API Reference section of the documentation for Search Index, Sort values and SearchIndex / Parameter combinations.

• ListSearch and ListLookup support for Wedding Registry (US only)

  ListSearch and ListLookup operations now support Wedding Registry.

• Purchases for Wishlist and Wedding Registry owners (US only)

  Customers can now purchase items from Wishlists/Wedding Registry for Wishlist owners. DetailPageURL users don’t need to do anything different to benefit from this feature. Remote Shopping Cart users need to pass in the ListItemId in their CartCreate/CartAdd requests. (Note : Due to a known issue in the US locale the MergeCart value will always evaluate True regardless of how it is set.)

• New Elements

  A new element IsEligibleForSuperSaverShipping is now available for Amazon’s offer indicating whether an item is eligible for Super Saver Shipping. A new element Edition is now available for the Books SearchIndex indicating the edition of the item. A new element SubTotal is now available in Cart operations at the Cart, CartItems and SavedForLaterItems levels. The SubTotal elements at CartItems and SavedForLaterItems level is the subtotal of all items in the corresponding element i.e. CartItems and SavedForLaterItems. The SubTotal element at the Cart level is total of the SubTotal’s at the CartItems and SavedForLaterItems levels. (Please refer to the WSDL/schema for the location and datatype of these elements)

• Changes to <Length>, <Height>, <Weight> and <Width> elements

  The <Length>, <Height>, <Weight> and <Width> elements are now available within <ItemDimensions> and <PackageDimensions> elements.

• SellerNickname now available in Cart operations

  Cart operations now return the SellerNickname.

• Changes to element data-types in the schema

  The following element data-types have been modified from NonNegativeIntegerWithUnits to DecimalWithUnits to accurately represent the data returned by ECS.

  AmazonMaximumAge, AmazonMinimumAge, CaseDiameter, CaseThickness, ContinuousShootingSpeed, CPUSpeed, DelayBetweenShots, DigitalZoom, DisplaySize, GraphicsMemorySize, ManufacturerMaximumAge, ManufacturerMinimumAge, MaximumAperture, MaximumResolution, MaximumShutterSpeed, MinimumShutterSpeed, MaximumWeightRecommendation, MonitorSize, MonitorViewableDiagonalSize, OpticalZoom, StoneWeight, SystemBusSpeed, TotalMetalWeight, WaterResistanceDepth

Resolved Issues

• TotalReviewPages element is now supported in Reviews response group

  TotalReviewPages element is now returned within the CustomerReviews element for all locales

• SellerLookup operation in intl locales does not return Feedback data

  The SellerLookup operation now supports Seller/SellerFeedback, Seller/AverageFeedbackRating, Seller/TotalFeedback, Seller/TotalFeedbackPages for intl locales.

• More than 3 offers per condition returned when Condition=All

  As per spec, ECS now returns only 3 offers per condition for ItemLookup when Condition=All. Hence the maximum returned (for US) is 12 (3 per Condition for “New”, “Used”, “Refurbished” “Collectible”).

• Boolean data-types are returned as “Y/N”

  Boolean data-types are now returned as “1/0”.

• Missing enum elements from AudienceRating in WSDL

  All documented AudienceRating enum values are now supported in the WSDL.

• ListName missing in ListLookup for ListmaniaLists

  This has been fixed.

• Incorrect Date format in CustomerContentLookup

  The Date element is now correctly formatted as “yyyy-mm-dd”.

• ItemSearch for SearchIndex=Miscellaneous did not support searching by BrowseNode

  This has been fixed.

Known Issues

• Customer Reviews not in-sync with the website

  Customer Reviews returned by search operations may not be in-sync with the website reviews.

• Documentation needs information on the About field

  The About element will only be returned for merchants. The About element will be returned   for Marketplace Sellers in the future.     

• ReleaseDate not returned for some items

  The ReleaseDate element is usually only returned for books, music, VHS, and DVD items. Few other products have a release date in the Amazon catalog.             

• Parent ASINs are not clearly labeled as such

  Parent ASINs (items that have variations) are not clearly labeled as such. Currently, you must request the VariationSummary response group to determine whether or not an item is a parent ASIN.             

• "ZShops" search index is currently "zShops"

  The "ZShops" search index is currently implemented as "zShops" (lowercase "z"). It will be changed to the capitalized form in a later release. This behavior applies to the SellerListingSearch operation.             

• Values of SellerListing response group are not localized

  Some values of the SellerListing reponse group are not localized for the JP locale.             

• ListLookup response for WishList missing elements for UK, DE

  In the UK (Amazon.co.uk), DE (Amazon.de, JP (Amazon.co.jp), FR (Amazon.fr) and CA (Amazon.ca) locales, a WishList lookup is missing the DateCreated and CustomerName elements. Also, for each Item node in the WishList, the ListitemId, DateAdded, QuantityDesired, QuantityReceived, Seller, and OfferAttributes elements do not appear. Under the OfferListing node, the OfferListingId and ExchangeId elements are missing.

• CE ASINs with variations are not returning a list of valid merchants

  CE ASINs with variations are not returning a list of valid merchants using ItemLookup.             

• ISPU items are not accessible via AWS Cart methods

  When inserting the ISPU items into the remote cart via OfferListingId, the cart rejects the item with the 'not accessible' error.

• Quoted phrase searching is not working in ItemSearch with Keywords

  Quoted phrases in the Keywords field for ItemSearch are not accepted as a whole phrase.   Instead, they are broken up into individual terms and results are returned for subsets of   the phrase. For example, the parameter Keywords="the last time" should only return results for   "the last time", rather than "the", "last" or "time".             

• CartCreate and CartAdd Help content does not specify required Items params

  The Help operation and missing_parameter error for CartCreate and CartAdd are not very useful. They say that "Items" is required; however, they don't specify the sub-parameters of Items that   must be present. This makes it difficult to determine what Items parameters are required by calling   the API.             

• Browse does not return a full list of nodes

  The list of nodes returned by BrowseNode for some ASINs is sometimes less than   the retail page.             

• SimilarityLookup for two ASINs that returns no results does not return an error

  The SimilarityLookup operation does not return a NoSimilarities error when no intersecting   similarities are found for multiple products that do have similarities.   The NoSimilarities error is correctly returned either when the SimilarityLookup request   is for one ASIN that has no similarities or when the SimilarityRequest is for two ASINs,   only one of which has similarities.             

• Default input content encoding may not be UTF-8

  The default input content encoding for ECS 4.0 is ISO-8859-1. The default content   input encoding should be UTF-8.             

• Sample stylesheet out of date

  A few aspects of the supplied sample stylesheet are incorrect: 1) The service name has changed from AWSProductData to AWSECommerceService. 2) The namespace used in the sample style sheet no longer exists. The current namespace is versioned 2004-08- 01, instead of 2004-03-19

• ItemSearch using TextStream may not work for all search indexes

  All SearchIndex values are not available to ItemSearch on TextStream, which includes stores like Tools, Software, and Jewelry.

New Release of Book Gecko

A new release of the Book Gecko tool for Amazon Marketplace sellers is now available. The new release uses version 4 of ECS. New features include automatic repricing with custom repricing options, instant pricing changes, automatic raising of prices, a free scouting tool, automatic product updates, and more. A free two week trial of Book Gecko is available on the home page.

Joey MacArthur, developer of Book Gecko, also runs the Book Gecko Blog.

Amaztype

The Amaztype application uses Amazon cover art to create a visual representation of any word, using titles which match that word. Very cool, requires Flash. Click on the background to zoom in, and hover the cursor over any cover to view more details.

XML Shell

The XML Shell allows command-line users to interactively query and manipulate XML data without writing any code. Written in Perl, the tool allows you to use a combination of Perl and XPath syntax to treat XML data structures as if they were genuine Perl objects. You can also navigate through the XML data hierarchy using familiar Unix commands such as cd, ls, and pwd.

XML Tips and Tricks

Courtesy of our friends over at IBM's DeveloperWorks site comes this collection of XML Tips and Tricks.

Near the bottom of that page, you can find some very worthwhile articles on the use of XSLT, including a tip on the use of XSLT to create lookup tables, along with the followup on defaults and error handling.

XML Editors

If you work with data from ECS (or any of the other Amazon services, for that matter) you may want to consider using an XML editor. Here's an article about open source XML editors. If you are looking for a commercial product, consider Altova's XML Spy.

Zuggest -- Dynamic Amazon Query

Francis Shanahan has developed Zuggest, a novel approach to searching the Amazon catalog. Simply enter your query, and Zuggest will make a call to ECS every couple of seconds and update the display accordingly.

Zuggest is an example of a so-called "Ajax" application, using a combination of asynchronous calls to ECS and direct processing of XML results to create a dynamic application which provides results "within the page", with no need for a page refresh.

New Version of Ruby/Amazon

Developers using the Ruby language to access AWS should be sure to check out the new release of Ruby/Amazon. If you are not familiar with Ruby, you can take a look at the official Ruby site and the Programming Ruby tutorial. Many Ruby developers have reported great success with the Ruby on Rails framework.