After 6 months, PyAWS 0.3.0 is eventually released. You can check out the tar ball here.

I almost abandoned this project as I found the XSLT approach is more appealing: ideal for AJAX application and easy to integrate via simplejson in the server side. Furthermore, I joined Microsoft, moved to Canada, and had less spare time to work on less interested hobby work. The last straw is the unexpected complicity of the the BIG FAT refactory.

Until recently, I got the email from one PyAWS user, he reported a bug on unexpected result of ListLookup operation. It is so good to hear from some users that this library still benefits somebody in the world. So I picked it up, completed the refactory and released it today. The library still in active development, the code style stinks, the document sucks and most of all, testing is lacking — I would explain it for a little bit here.

I am a big fan of TDD personally, and we have respected testing troops to help building our products in MSFT as well. However, the complexity of PyAWS is far beyond my capacity: there are tens of operations and twenties of response groups, and response groups may combine, that make it extremely difficult to cover all the paths. To make it worse, the AWS is dynamic, there is no guarantee that the consecutive queries would return the same result. I may consider automation to facilitate the unit tests. If you have better ideas, please leave a comment here.

PyAWS was ready for release for about one week. I just managed to squeeze some time to wrap up the package, develop the web site, and boom, it is released.

PyAWS is a Python wrapper for the latest Amazon Web Service, forked from the code base of pyamazon. This library is intentionally designed for an eBook management tool to fetch the meta data from Amazon. Well, the tool is still in blueprint, I would like to roll up the sleeves after the PyAWS is stable enough.

Currently, PyAWS only supports E-Commerce Service, I hope this library benefits to the community, at least the python developers do not need suffer from traversing the DOM tree any longer. Other services are still in the plan, and last but not the least, they are not free. Once I collect enough fund, or Amazon would grant me the free access to the premium services, I would start coding on that.

Thanks to Comix and feedparser, the Web site is shamelessly copied from the two.

Eventually, I could not tolerate myself to postpone the development of gelman, a eBook management system any longer, so I registered a new project in Sf.net: gelman

Gelman is named after the Gelman library in GWU. Both of them are lightweight.

• All immutable meta data is stored online, aka Amazon Web Service (AWS)
• User preference is stored in sqlite in-process database
• Implemented by PyKDE
• Tag support
• Script and plug-in support

Here is the proposal to sf.net:

Yet another personal media management system. What makes the gelman distinguishing?

1. plug-in. The user may override the default behavior
2. lightweight.
3. Tag support Organize the media in del.icio.us way
4. scriptable

UPDATE: This project is rejected by sf.net due to the vague description. Since I do not have an developement environment for PyKDE right now, I would revise the proposal and re-submit it later.