Project Goals

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow registered developers to integrate Amazon features into their applications and websites, including product search and listing as well as shopping card features. The AWS Integration project helps developers integrate with this by adding an additional layer consistent with the J2EE methodology and design patterns.

In short, the project will be split into the following areas;

1. Provide the client code to hide the web services details from the developer. This is an Axis generated set of classes that allow the details of SOAP requests/responses to be hidden. This forms the proposed EIS access layer.
2. Provide the Data Access Object (DAO) interfaces (see Java Blueprints) for accessing Amazon data in a logical way. This allows easier use of 1. above.
3. Provide concrete implementations of 2. using SOAP to access their services. In addition the REST protocol could also be implemented. Other developers might implement a data source version (for example, to cache results in a local MySQL database).
4. Provide a set of transfer objects (see Java Blueprints) for encapsulating Amazon data. This is required as the AWS WSDL provides large and cumbersome data structures, the transfer objects will be more specific, for example, showing information just on DVDs or books.
5. Provide an optional session façade (and possibly business delegate) layer implemented as session EJBs.
   

The AWS is a large set of web services, which broadly cover the following areas;

• ECommerce (Amazon product data and e-commerce features).
• Alexa web information (using Amazon’s Alexa engine to retrieve meta-data about web sites)
• Simple Queue (a message queue service, not relevant for this project)

Initially, the project would be interested in the AWS Ecommerce web services. The ECommerse service itself offers detailed search and retrieval of Amazon product data (books, DVD etc), product images, customer reviews, shopping cart functions, lists and more. Implementing integration with this using the approach outlined above area is the key goal of the project.

Typically a developer wishing to use the web services would need to delve into web services as a technology and code up functionality similar to 1. above, the project will give this for free (using Axis) but in addition provide a simpler and standard J2EE approach to access the data through a J2EE application’s data access layer. This will allow clients to quickly adopt the services into their applications There may also be potential for TagLibs allowing easy presentation in JSP pages.

For more information on AWS please see http://www.amazon.com/webservices.

Development will be using Java with detailed descriptions on a common developer environment (Eclipse, Eclipse WST, descriptions of dependencies etc), target platforms will be conforming J2EE application servers with development environments being based on Apache, Tomcat 5, (optionally) JBoss. We are looking to create an active open source project so that we can utilize the full AWS features set and keep it up-to-date.