Working with Ruby and Amazon Web Services: Ruby/AWS 0.8 Released

by Joe Brockmeier - Feb. 23, 2010Comments (1)

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After a long pause in releases, a new version of Ruby/AWS is available for developers looking to work with Ruby and Amazon's product advertising API. Ruby/AWS makes it possible to access carts and catalogs on Amazon.com, and a number of the regional sites as well. This release supports most of the AWS v4 API, though some operations are not entirely implemented.

Not to be confused with Amazon Web Services like EC2 and S3, Ruby/AWS can be used to work with Amazon's product advertising API to advertise Amazon products on third-party sites through Amazon's affiliate program. The API gives access to wish lists, customer reviews, and other Amazon features. Using Ruby/AWS, developers can manage the Amazon catalog and create, add, clear, and modify carts on Amazon.com as well as the Amazon sites for the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and Canada.

For more information on the API, see Amazon's documentation and resources. Ruby/AWS is written by Ian Macdonald, and licensed under the GPL. This package replaces the older Ruby/Amazon package that was written to work with version 3 of Amazon's API. Ruby/AWS 0.8 requires Ruby 1.8.6 rather than 1.8.7 (the newest release), which will be easier for users of Linux distributions still shipping 1.8.6. Prior versions required 1.8.7.

The 0.8 release followed 0.7 by eight months, and was held up by Macdonald's decision to re-write parts of the project to better handle the way that batched requests and multiple operations for communicating with Amazon were performed. According to the notes, this release should be much more robust and fix a few errors in retrieving product results from Amazon.

Source, Ruby Gem, and RPMs for Fedora 12 are available from Macdonald's site.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at jzb@zonker.net and follow him on Twitter.