I have had a long a flirting relationship with Amazon ECS thru using it with PHP and SOAP, and now that I am totally ColdFusion reliant I have revisited the products sectionon my site, and done something a bit more useful with it.
Amazon ECS is a pretty simple system.
- Hit a URL with some variables
- receive XML response
- process XML to something friendly
- display or save that info
So how is it done?
First of all go and sign up for an API key.You need this to allow Amazon to feed you with the information you requested. Login to the AWS Portal and on the Right, click Your WebServices Account > AWS Access Identifiers.
Next, go check out and have a read of the the latest API Technical Documentation.
Now to set up your first request. Lets get information on a single item using the ASINcode. So you can go find an ASIN from anywhere on Amazon – I will let you do that.
Now heres the easy bit, lets write some ColdFusion to get information about that item you just picked up.
So this forms a URL with a bunch of variables, including your id and product you want, and it also asks Amazon to give you back the Medium response group. This will contain the response groups: EditorialReview, Images, ItemAttributes, OfferSummary, Request, SalesRank, Small (basic Item information). These are all pretty self explanatory and you can search through the XML to see other stuff it returns. Now to get the URL at Amazon that this page lives at
You are now all set to print out a bunch of information about the item to a web page!
