At the
Sells Conference,
Jeff Barr just gave us an
hour or
so on Amazon’s latest web-services offerings. The one I liked was the
Alexa Web
Information Service, which gives you a programmatic hook into the big,
nifty Alexa database.
Here’s how cool raw HTTP+XML web services are: while Jeff was talking, I
went and got myself an Amazon Subscriber ID and
cobbled together a CGI script with perl and curl and
sed so you can type a URI into a web page and it’ll bounce back
with a nice display of its Alexa rank.
I’d post it here at ongoing for your pleasure, except
for curl doesn’t seem to be installed.
Jeff didn’t get to AWIS until he was three-quarters of the way through his
talk, but that was plenty of time.
The point is, as several people here at the conference have said, it
isn’t about REST or SOAP or WS-* or .NET or Java or whatever, it’s about
easy.
