How do I interact with the Amazon Product Advertising API in my Rails app?

Question

I'm building a Rails web app and was wondering what is the best way to get a list of products that Amazon would return based on a search term?

For example, if I sent amazon the term "iphone", I'd get a list of iPhones back from Amazon.

Answer 1

The Ruby/AWS library (gem: ruby-aaws) seems to do it. Not much in the way of examples, but with some code searches I'm sure you can turn up something.

Answer 2

I've always used the amazon-ecs gem. Despite the name, it looks like it's still under active development (last updated August 27th, 2009).

http://github.com/jugend/amazon-ecs

Here is a blog post that might help you on your way:

http://www.pluitsolutions.com/projects/amazon-ecs

Answer 3

Another pottential library to do this is amazon-product-advertising-api, but I cannot say anything else about it as I haven't tried it.

Answer 4

So the Ruby/AWS library is the way to go. There is a pretty good tutorial here

Pablo, ruby-aaws worked nearly out of the box for me. I just had to setup a .amazonrc file with the configuration options like my amazon affiliate id and AWS public and secret keys.

Answer 5

I second Ruby/AWS. It has support for ListSearch and ListLookup. Amazon-ecs has comparatively less support for the API.