Amazon Hacks

Using All Consuming’s SOAP and REST Interfaces

You can retrieve a list of the most-mentioned books in the weblog community, as well as personal book lists and recommendations, through either of All Consuming’s two Web Service APIs.

This hack could represent the future of web applications. It glues together pieces of several Web Service APIs, and then in turn offers an API to its features. If someone were to create a derivative application with this API, it would represent a third layer of abstraction from Amazon’s service. Entire lightweight services may someday be built layer upon layer like this—with dozens of interconnected applications exchanging data freely behind the scenes.

All Consuming [Hack #47] is a fairly small application built on top of a mountain of information that has been made freely available through Web Services. Amazon’s Web Services fuel the invaluable book information, Google’s API allows me to get related web sites for book titles, and weblogs.com has an XML file that lets me know which web sites have been updated each hour. Combining these three services, I can create lists of books that are being talked about on the Web. It only makes sense for me to give back to this generous community by opening up SOAP and REST interfaces to All Consuming’s information, to be used for free and in any way that can be invented.

The SOAP Code

Here’s an example of how you can access All Consuming information on your own using SOAP and Perl [Hack #88]. Create a file called ...