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Thursday March 06, 2008

Whither Decent/Working Amazon API For Amazon Associates Web Service?

I have several small Python scripts that use the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 to do things like read my Amazon wish lists and lookup books via their ISBN numbers.

Last week I received an email from the Amazon Web Services folks. It states:

We are writing to remind you that the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 will be deprecated on March 31st, 2008. Our monitoring indicates that your Subscription Id was passed into calls to Amazon E-Commerce Service 3.0 between February 17th and 24th, 2008. After March 31st, 2008, we will no longer accept Amazon ECS 3.0 requests. Please upgrade to the Amazon Associates Web Service (previously called Amazon E-Commerce Web Service 4.0) by then to ensure that you or your customers are not affected by the deprecation (if you migrated your application after February 24th, 2008, you will be unaffected). Please also note that none of the links you generate from Associates Central are affected by the deprecation. Any links, widgets or banner ads that you may have on your site will continue to function after March 31st.

Their meaning of "deprecated" is obviously different than the Java API's, where deprecated methods continued to work for several years.

It's true that Amazon have given fair warning about this change which was announced in February 2007. They even point to a migration guide.

My usual approach to things like this is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but it really looks like this is going to break in about 3-4 weeks, so I've been doing a bit of research.

I see nothing in the Amazon migration guide that points to new Python API that would help here. I have been using pyamazon and on that web page it states:

Kun Xi is starting a fork of PyAmazon to support some of the new features of AWS 4.x. This project is being hosted on Sourceforge. Initial code is available at: https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pyaws/.

The link is wrong. You can find it here.

I had a look at that. I got his example to work, but it really does seem incomplete. (He calls it pre-alpha for a reason). The documentation is sparse, and there aren't a lot of examples. Because of this, perhaps I'm not understanding how it fully works, but I don't see the equivalent of pyamazon calls like:

       books = amazon.searchByASIN(asin)

So what are people using to access the new Amazon Associates Web Service? Is there a simple decent working Python API? Is there something somewhere that can easily map the old pyamazon API calls like:

        amazon.setLicense(amazonAccessKey)
        books = amazon.searchByASIN(asin)
        results = amazon.searchByWishlist(amazonWishListID, page=pageNo)
        books = amazon.searchByAuthor(author, page=pageNo)

to similar easy-to-understand new ones?

Inquiring minds wanna know...

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