I have started working on the Amazon API. My plan is to make it possible to compare prices with eBay with a simple click. The first step is to make a little Ajax-based browser for the Amazon categories.

The Amazon API is very straight forward BUT, the categories or browsenodes as they call them are a bit messed up. You can not get the top level, which is called a SearchIndex, programmatically.

There are only two interfaces, Soap and Rest (eBay has way too many interfaces and version of everything). I am going for the Rest interface as it seems to cover everything I need and is extremely simple to implement. There is very little security as there as everything is read-only. There is a limit of one call per second that can be a bit tricky to implement.

One interesting not is that a typical search response returns very similiar XML, it is possible to use the same code to parse the XML.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 8:35 am and is filed under Ajax, Web 2.0, Amazon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.