Amazon E-Commerce Services
Wonderful is the word.
For those who don’t know what AWS is, it’s the Amazon API for accessing their info. There are hundreds and hundreds of sites out there using this API to power their affiliates stores. Amazon pays the affiliates 10% of all sales generated if the site manages to make a sale for Amazon.
The way it works is that you, the affiliate, place a request through a SOAP client for data pertaining to a particular Item/Group of items. Amazon processes this request and returns the data to you in an XML file. To pass this request to Amazon and get the data I used a class by Calin Uioreanu over at php9 (Thank you!)
To parse the data you need a custom parser. I used one provided by Keith Devens (A big thank you!). I didn’t use Colin’s parser because of one reason and one reason only, it didn’t return the parsed XML file in a serilaised manner which Keith’s class does. I did try to modify Colin’s class a little but it was more trouble than I wanted, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea, it just means I didn’t want the headache. 
I started using the API because I recieved a project which required data off amazon, sorta like an affiliates site but with more. Initially it was a headache, I couldn’t figure out what was what. Amazon’s docs weren’t nearly enough and there is close to zero support for AWS. But then is started to come together.
It took me about a day to figure out what parameters would get me what. Seriously, the amazon support isn’t enough. They need a more detailed explanation of pretty much everything and more than that they need to provide detailed examples. It took me 4 hours to figure out how to get the latest releases of Music CD’s from there.
It’s a pretty good API although I wish Amazon would provide us with more options. Oh and they should lower their international shipping rates or open an India store so I can start my affiliates store. 
If anyone needs help with the API feel free to drop me a line or post a message here. I’d be happy to help since it would give me a better insight into the API as well.
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I played around with S3 using jets3t. The Amazon APIs seems to be pretty straight-forward but the price (IMO) is about 10x too high. It seems fairly cheap at first glance but if youre someone like me who may want to store 100GB+ of lifelong collections of music, pictures, videos, etc, as well as share them with friends, it will cost you as much money as a gym membership. And knowing that amazon uses cheap 2nd hand hardware.. Im looking at moving to rackspace’s cloud file solution.