Amazon Hacks

Program AWS with Mozilla

Mozilla provides all the tools you need to build applications that integrate with Amazon’s Web Services.

Mozilla is more than an alternative web browser—it’s also a platform for building applications. It has a built-in XML-based format for defining application interfaces called XUL (XML-based User-interface Language). When you combine the tag-based XUL with JavaScript and Mozilla’s built-in components, you have a cross-platform development environment perfect for building web applications.

This hack provides an interface for searching Amazon. The XUL defines a simple search form, a space for search results (called a tree), and an HTML iframe for viewing the product detail pages of search results.

The Code

The first part of the application is the XUL file itself. Beyond defining the interface, it holds the code that contacts Amazon to perform the search. When you click the Search button, the doSearch( ) function is triggered. This fetches the search results from Amazon and puts them in the search results tree. The other function, displayItem( ), runs when an individual item in the search results is clicked. It sets the HTML iframe location URL to the product detail page for that item (formatted with your associate tag, of course).

Save this code in a file called hack.xul .

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- ***** BEGIN LICENSE BLOCK ***** - Version: MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1 - - The contents of this file are subject to the Mozilla Public License - Version ...