Information Technology Tips

In this post, I will explain the simplest setup to use Amazon Product API in Java. I know Amazon provides soap interface and we can automatically create Soap code for accessing Amazon Product API. But sometimes, it is too much for light users. So I will show you the simplest way to use Amazon Product API using SignedRequestsHelper. Hope this post helps your application development ;) Preparation Create an AWS Account Get AWS Key, secret key and associate tag: I think you can create them from http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSGettingStartedGuide/AWSCredentials.html Get SignedRequestsHelper: You can download from https://code.google.com/p/amazon-product-advertising-api-sample/source/browse/src/com/amazon/advertising/api/sample/SignedRequestsHelper.java Java Code Example Congratulation! After you finish above preparation, now you can request Amazon Product API!! The following code shows how to use SignedRequestsHelper. The key points of the examp...

Some pages in amazon provide images which user can zoom on, like this page. The question is "Where is the original hi-resolution image?". You can easily find the explanation page for how to construct url for original hi-res image. (See this stack overflow page .) In this post I will show you the code snippet for getting original hires imgae from ASIN code. Note!: This method might be unavailable if amazon change the implementation of zoom and hires image url construnction. Code Actually code is nothing special. Just find " DynAPI.addZoomViewer( " . // pattern for extracting image code used for retrieving original image. private static Pattern AMAZON_ZOOM_IMAGE_PATTERN = Pattern.compile("DynAPI\\.addZoomViewer\\(\".+/(.+?)\",\\s*(.+?),\\s*(.+?),\\s*(.+?),\\s*(.+?),\\s*(.+?),.*\\)"); public static String findOriginalZoomImageUrl(String asin, String country) { String url = getAmazonZoomImageWindowUrl(asin, country); try{ ...

Recently I realized that Amazon offers high resolution photos in some products. I have found the way to extract these hires images. Note Note!: This method might be unavailable in the future because Amazon may not like this kind of hack or change the implementation :P Basic Strategy For example, this page: http://www.amazon.com/Silver-Violin-Nicola-Benedetti/dp/B008CYV046/ If you see the html source of this page, you can find the following json string. var colorImages = {"initial":[{"large":"http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/XXXXXXX.jpg",.... It represents the urls of various size of images. If you would like to see the hi-resolution image, you should pick up the url which is defined in hiRes property. Source Code You know I still like Java, I will show you the simple Java code. I use Jackson for parsing JSon string. import java.io.IOException; import java.net.URISyntaxException; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; imp...