Amazon.com : Java Glossary

 Unfortunately Amazon has been applying bogus software patents to its competitors. They patented the use of the cookie for e-commerce, and have also patented one-click sales and the use of commissioned referring sites. So please use the Bookstores section to find alternate bookstores. You might also follow the boycott link and add your website to it.

Amazon.com is an enormous online bookstore that carries many Java related books. If you visit them by clicking on the logo, I get a 5% commission on any books, tapes or CD (Compact Disk)s you buy. The main disadvantages of shopping this way, is, if you elect standard ground shipping, you can wait 4 to 10 weeks for delivery and you can’t peruse the entire books. The main advantage is the huge selection. If you click the logo, you will be taken to the store. To search by ISBN (International Standard Book Number), click book search then ISBN when you get there or go directly to ISBN search. To do searches combining incomplete information about author, title etc. click book search then power search once you get there.

Besides books, Amazon now sells electronics, DVD (Digital Video Disk) s, food, and magazine subscriptions.

You can do a variety of affiliate links to the Amazon.com website:

Types of Links To Amazon.com
text link to a specific book	Buy Java Persistence with Hibernate
image link to a specific book
search box
CMP (Canadian Mind Products) Book Macros	recommend book⇒Java Concurrency in Practice by: Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua J. Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea 978-0-321-34960-6 paperback publisher: Addison-Wesley B004V9OA84 kindle published: 2006-05-19 Bloch and Lea especially have very good reputations in concurrent programming. This is the dream team to write such a book. abe books anz abe books.co.uk abe books.de amazon.co.uk amazon.de abe books.ca iberlibro.com amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo abe books.fr abe books.com amazon.fr amazon.com abe books.it Barnes & Noble amazon.it Powells O’Reilly Safari Sony e-books Kobo Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

Programmer API (Application Programming Interface)

Screen scraping will drive you insane at Amazon because the pages are formatted inconsistently, they make ever increasing use of JavaScript, and they change the layouts frequently just to keep things interesting.

Thankfully, they have created a programmer’s API. called AWS (Amazon Web Services) or more recently the PA-API (Product Advertising Application Programming Interface). Actually there are dozens of dozens of them actually, to let you do all manner of things including getting the information about a book in computer-friendly, and reasonably stable form — XML (extensible Markup Language)/SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Each country has its own servers, own accounts, own passwords, own XML schema… Unfortunately for batch processes, they don’t want you to do more than 200 inquiries per hour. Oddly, the problem is too much documentation and too many samples. You are overwhelmed. Don’t try to make sense of the complicated stuff until you gave found introductory docs and mastered the basics. Read the Getting Started Guide first. To help avoid overloading Amazon’s servers, find a response format that includes just what you need. Amazon issues you user IDs and passwords to use on all queries so they can track what you are up to with the API. They also insist that all queries be digitally signed and sent with HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over SSL (Secure Socket Layer)). You can sign by computing your own RFC 2104-compliant HMAC-SHA256 digital signature, or you can use Oasis WSS (Web Services Security) SOAP -Style signing, using your own X.509 certificate or one provided by Amazon. I guess they are preparing for a sophisticated DOS (Denial Of Service attack) attack.

To use it you will need:

• An Amazon account for buying books.
• An Amazon affiliate account for selling books.
• An AWSaccount for using the API.
• You need to WSimport http://ecs.amazonaws.com/AWSECommerceService/AWSECommerceService.wsdl so that JAX understands the grammar of the responses, not just with an XSD (XML Scheme Definition), but with generated Java code.

You don’t need AWS SDK (Software Development Kit). All you need is AWSECommerceService.wsdl, and Java’s built-in JAX features.

There is a utility called the Amazon Product Advertising API Signed Requests Helper that helps you understand how queries are constructed. It sorts the parameters alphabetically, adds a timestamp and digitally signs the request to form a GET URL (Uniform Resource Locator). It is out of date. It fails to mention the &AssociateTag=canadianmindprod mandatory parameter. It is set up for Version=2009-03-31 rather than Version=2010-11-01. It does not work in Opera. All queries use the same service, Service=AWSECommerceService but a different Operation=ItemSearch, Operation=ItemLookup etc. Here is what a typical query looks like:

Fields to use in your inquiries you may find of interest include:

• AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
• AssociateTag=canadianmindprod
• IdType=ASIN
• IdType=EAN
• IdType=ISBN
• ItemId=9780618918249
• Keywords=harry+potter
• Operation=ItemLookup
• Operation=ItemSearch
• ResponseGroup=AlternateVersions
• ResponseGroup=Images,ItemAttributes
• ResponseGroup=Images
• ResponseGroup=ItemAttributes
• ResponseGroup=ItemIds
• ResponseGroup=Large
• ResponseGroup=Medium
• ResponseGroup=RelatedItems&RelationshipType=AuthorityTitle
• ResponseGroup=Small
• ResponseGroup=Variations
• SearchIndex=All
• SearchIndex=Books
• SearchIndex=DVD
• SearchIndex=Electronics
• SearchIndex=Music
• Service=AWSECommerceService
• Timestamp=2012-02-17T02%3A46%3A44.000Z
• Version=2010-11-01
• Signature=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Fields of interest in the responses include:

• amount
• author
• availability
• binding
• ean
• isbn
• largeImage
• lowestSalePrice
• mediumImage
• publicationDate
• publisher
• smallImage
• title

The XML response has a complex tree structure, it is not just a matter of requesting the field you want.

You can batch up to ten queries in on request.

They also have SDK s for half a dozen languages. I don’t know much about it.

Other Countries

• You can use the same AWSAccessKeyId/secret key pair for both the amazon.com and amazon.ca. It most probably works on all other countries as well.
• You need a separate associate id for each country.
• Happily there is a common AWSECommerceService.wsdl schema for amazon.com and amazon.ca. It most probably is the same for other countries, even China. This means you can use the same generated JAX files.
• Each country has its own AWS server, or endpoint as Amazon so foppishly calls them.

The web is littered with obsolete lists of the endpoint urls. You can find the most recent list inside AWSECommerceService.wsdl. You don’t use the endpoints directly unless you are experimenting with Amazon Product Advertising API Signed Requests Helper. Otherwise you use the corresponding port getter e.g. AWSECommerceService.getAWSECommerceServicePortCA() or AWSECommerceService.getAWSECommerceServicePort(); and JAX looks effectively looks up the corresponding end point in AWSECommerceService.wsdl (using pregenerated code).

TestItemSearch: Sample Code For Amazon AWS API

It took weeks to get this little sample program to use the Amazon AWS API working. Even the Signed Requests Helper utility took days to get working. The problem is Amazon makes their API more and more complicated each year, but do not update the documentation, and they refuse to provide complete example code. I have never in my career of 49 years seen a more incompetently documented API. Further the API is not consistent. Further it is often idiotic, e.g. returning the number of results as a BigInteger when even a short would have done fine.

AwsHandlerResolver

I downloaded this AwsHandlerResolver code from the Amazon website, then modified it to use the more compact CMP Base64 classes. AwsHandlerResolver handles the poorly documented stuff like adding a timestamp, digitally signing your request and Base64 ASCII-armouring the signature.

FetchBookFacts

The following is a more complicated example. You give it an ISBN-13 (aka EAN (European Article Number) ) on the command line and it probes the Amazon API to find the title, author, publisher, published date. It also probes for the ISBN-13s of alternate bindings, e.g. Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, Audio. It creates a text file (in the form of an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) macro) summarising this information and downloads the large bookcover image. It does not include the author birth/death dates since Amazon does not track them. On my website, those fields are added later by code part of HTMLMacros.

IsASINInStock

The following takes either an isbn13 or asin and probes the Amazon.com AWS API to find out if the product is in stock. The results do not correspond well with the information on the website. I don’t know which is actually correct.

Tips

• Use the Signed Requests Helper utility before you try to write an Java code. It lets you rapidly experiment with various requests, it shows you the complete result, and it is easier to pick out embedded error messages.
• The API is quite slow, about 6 seconds to get the information for one book. This is slower than screen scraping the website intended for humans. However, I found if I submitted a request more frequently than once every 20 seconds to amazon.com or every 10 seconds to the other Amazon sites they would start refusing to respond to my probes.
• Google the entry web, not just amazon.com for code snippets using the same of methods and parms. Amazon’s website is nearly always out of date, incomplete and just plain wrong. You need to find examples elsewhere and do a lot of experimenting.
• You don’t need the Amazon SDK. I don’t know what it is for, perhaps languages other than Java.
• After you generate the Java source from the AWSECommerceService.wsdl, just insert it into your project as if you had hand-written it.
• Try modifying the sample code I have given you, then morphing it gradually to what you need.

Books

	recommend book⇒Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB
	by:	James Murty	978-0-596-51581-2	paperback
	publisher:	O’Reilly	978-0-596-55179-7	ebook
	published:	2008-04-01	B004OR1JF0	kindle
It covers: S3 : online storage to store and retrieve data EC2 : online computing to be able to run jobs on a farm of machines SQS : web messaging infrastructure for computer-computer communication FPS : flexible payment system for moving money online SimpleDB : store and retrieve datasets online It is about doing your computing by renting Amazon servers. It is not about using the AWS Amazon Product Advertising API to do book referrals.
abe books anz abe books.co.uk abe books.de amazon.co.uk amazon.de abe books.ca iberlibro.com amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo abe books.fr abe books.com amazon.fr amazon.com abe books.it Barnes & Noble amazon.it Powells O’Reilly Safari Sony e-books Kobo
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock