I've now tried Amazon's Simple Queue Service, and it doesn't work like I expected. Once I queue stuff up, and try to retrieve it, it doesn't all come back. It comes back in random chunks of data. I never know how many of my queued items will be returned, or what order they'll come back in. This despite running the proper queries to retrieve everything. I need to run the "return all" query a minimum of 5 times before I get all 10 items in the queue back to me. I posted to the (empty) developer forums for the simple queue service 6 hours ago, and have received no reply. I'm not sure if the lights are on over there because the forum is totally empty...
So then I tried to make REST requests to the Alexa Web Information Services (AWIS) web service. Despite using Amazon's own signing test page, I only receive a very non-descriptive "not_authorized_11456" error. That sucks! Browsing through their sparse forums, I've found a couple of people looking into the same issue. I even saw one post of somebody from Amazon that said "we're looking into it" and then never responded back saying it was fixed, or that it was a bigger issue.
Same non-descriptive error as above for the REST request to the Alexa Web Search Platform (Beta).
So my question to Amazon is. WHY SHOULD I USE YOUR WEB SERVICES IN MY APPS? I can't get them to work. The documentation is incomplete, the forums are empty, the support avenues are limited, the response is non-existent.
The potential is great! The ideas are awesome! Oh the cool stuff I could build - if only it worked! aurgghhhh! That's the answer - that's why I'll use them. I'll continue to be frustrated and wait for Amazon to get it together because the promise of these web services are too great to ignore.
In the mean time, don't ask me anything - I might bite your head off...
Labels: programming