Ruby/Amazon now obsolete

2008-04-02

On the 31^st of March, 2008, Amazon oficially retired their AWS 3.x web service in favour of the new Amazon ECS 4.0 service. Since Alexandria's old Amazon book provider used the Ruby/Amazon library, which in turn used the 3.x service, the old provider will no longer work.

The Alexandria project thanks Ian, over at caliban.org, who wrote Ruby/Amazon which Alexandria has relied upon for many years. We are not yet using Ian's replacement Amazon/AWS library, which supports the 4.0 API; instead we have included a slightly modified copy of Herryanto Siatono's simple amazon-ecs library directly into Alexandria's code (without adding a new dependency).

The new Amazon ECS provider, based upon amazon-ecs, was included in Alexandria 0.6.3

Users of that version should still have Amazon support (as long as you have installed the required hpricot library). Anyone using earlier versions of Alexandria should upgrade to 0.6.3 to get Amazon support back. In either case, you should push the old Amazon provider down to the bottom of the Provider Preferences list to prevent an unnecessary failing search with each query. The next version of Alexandria will remove this obsolete provider.