Amazon is advancing the boundaries of the Internet through their powerful suite of web services. Innovative developers are combining Amazon data with other freely available sources to create new and interesting applications known as Mashups. This book teaches you the techniques behind mashup applications and for the first time shows you how to build them yourself.

The examples in this book show you how to integrate Amazon web services with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. You'll learn how to combine data from disparate sources to create new applications using next generation browser techniques such as AJAX, JSON and Dynamic Scripting. You will learn how to re-purpose web service data so that it can be consumed from mobile devices such as a cell phone or PDA. Because both the theory and code are explained, you'll be able to easily take the lessons in this book to build your own killer mashup applications.

Expert web services developer Francis Shanahan guides you through the basics of web service consumption using XML, SOAP and REST. Next generation browser techniques such as AJAX are illustrated in easy to follow step by step examples. He also completes the picture by introducing advanced techniques to enhance performance such as the multi-threading web service features of ASP 2.0.

With this book, you'll discover how to:

• Build a generic AJAX library from the ground up
• Consume publicly available APIs such as Yahoo!(r) Search, Google(r), eBay(r) and YouTube
• Use SOAP to expose Amazon data as RSS
• Convert Amazon data directly into JSON using XSLT
• Plot Amazon customers on Yahoo Maps
• Use the OpenSearch API to build your own search service
• Access Amazon data from your cell phone using WML

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who have some prior experience with web technologies such as Javascript(r) and ASP. This book covers a wide range of technologies and techniques including ASP 2.0, WML, REST, RSS, SOAP, XML, XSLT, AJAX and JSON. Everything in the book is built using free tools and explained in detail, along with the source code which makes this a useful resource regardless of experience level.