[Alexandria-list] Amazon AWS 3.0 deprecation, switch to ECS 4.0

[Cathal Mc Ginley]

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I recently got this reminder from the "Amazon Web Services Developer
Connection Newsletter":

    This is an important reminder that the Amazon
    E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 will be deprecated on March 31st, 2008,
    after which we will no longer accept Amazon ECS 3.0 requests.

Ruby/Amazon is based upon the AWS v3 API, so I think we're going to
have to rewrite our Amazon provider. There exists a small, simple ruby
library for dealing with Amazon ECS version 4.0 (the RESTful API):
amazon-ecs  http://www.pluitsolutions.com/projects/amazon-ecs
which has an MIT license (not very clear from the website, but in the
code). The library is 300 lines of Ruby, so there is a case for
incorporating it directly into Alexandria, perhaps even cutting it down
and modifying it as needed (being careful with the copyright notices
of course!). 

As it's such a small lib, a lot of the nice object structure provided by
Ruby/Amazon is absent (from what I've seen with a quick glance). But it
does allow us to interact with the RESTful web service on a
fine-grained level.

Anyway, I was thinking of writing this thing myself, but I've plenty
of other stuff to be working on & I've decided not to be greedy! :^) So,
in case anyone else wants to have a go, this could be a good place to
start coding on Alexandria. You just have to read up on Amazon ECS 4.0,
there's a migration guide here:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=627

Then have a look at the current provider:
lib/alexandria/book_providers/amazon.rb
and create a new one in its image (amazon_ecs.rb) and start switching
over the features.

Anyway, we're going to need new Amazon ECS support for our next
release, so if no-one gets around to writing this I'm sure I
can handle it. If I do, I'll write a tutorial on how I approached it.

   -   Cathal.
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