Mauricio Díaz - 2005-07-10

As many of you may have noticed, I had stopped working on amazOOP for a while, but I'm back.

For those of you who are interested (and please let me know that there are people interested in this, otherwise continuing development won't seem worth the effort) here's where we stand:

- The next version will _not_ be written in PHP 5. I apologize if I raised false hopes, but after careful thinking, I figured that most people haven't made the move to PHP 5 yet (my hosting provider included).

- Next release will be a real API. For more than a year now, I've been promising a PHP API to access Amazon's Web Services, but all I have delivered is some sort of pseudo-application. The next release will be a real, well documented, API with which you will be able to create your own PHP applications without being limited by my configuration files or any other constraints.

- For who actually liked my previous pseudo-application, I have good news too. Once I finish coding the API, I'll rewrite the "shop builder" (if you can call it that) and release the improved version here.

- The API will query Amazon's ECS 4. What does this mean? Amazon's E-Commerce Services 4, also known as ECS 4 and briefly as AWS 4, is the latest version of Amazon's Web Services. It includes plenty of new features and should allow anything developed with amazOOP to be much faster.

- A much awaited feature, that's a consequence of the point above, but so important that it deserves its own point: you will be able to query data from _all_ Amazon's locales. That's right, .com, .co.uk, .de and .co.jp *as well as* .fr and .ca!

Now, some development concerns and general questions:

- My most important concern: should the API, somehow manage the cache? All AWS (or ECS) applications must cache the data they get from Amazon, but, by definition, API functions shouldn't be responsible for this. What do you think?

- Are you interested in nightly builds?

- Would you like the new version to be available in CVS?

- Would you like the documentation to be available as it is written?

Well, I think this is everything for now. I await your comments.

Regards,

Mauricio DIAZ ORLICH