Amazon takes a razor to its homepage
Published: 21 Jul 2003 17:10 BST
Barr claims the Amazon hacker community has a vested interest in protecting its parent's good name and any troublemakers are dealt with from within or swiftly reported to Amazon central.
"It happens very infrequently. It is something that doesn't happen enough that we could actually keep count of it," he says. "The fact there is a business relationship involved means that people aren't going to build a negative site. The community is also somewhat self-policing. The associates themselves will protect the integrity of the programme."
Making the majority of Amazon hackers a part of its Associates programme adds another level of security checks to make sure that not just anyone can join the club. The programme predates the Web services launch and has some pretty stringent guidelines on what kind of site a company that chooses to link to Amazon can run and how they can represent their relationship to the e-commerce kingpin.
Although Amazon has allowed developers to create sites using its tools it still remains extremely protective of customer data, says Barr.
"None of the services we have will eve reveal any personally identifying information. The current set of services is just a parallel of the information on the existing Web site. So there is nothing in the returns data that you couldn't get from visiting the Web site as an anonymous user," he says.
Much has been made of the two divergent paths of Web services technology: Microsoft's catch-all .Net platform in one camp and Sun's Java-based J2EE tools in the other. But Amazon refuses to enter the debate, or even acknowledge a debate exists, claiming the best of both systems are used internally and by the developer community.
"They are really platform-independent. I really can't tell you what set of technologies are most popular among our users. It could be J2EE, it could be .Net language, it could be Perl, it could be PHP. The really great thing about Web services is that because you have the XML representation in the middle it so it really doesn't matter," he says
The dot-com is historically a fierce protector of its technical architecture lest the slightest clue reveals a chink in its armour to some unscrupulous cracker.
"We never share a lot of information about our systems infrastructure because our security folks don't like to let the outside world know what's inside. There are literally thousands of servers inside our firewall and I am sure that if you dig far enough you will find at least one of everything. We like to work with all different vendors," says Barr.
But there are some technical issues that Barr is willing to go into detail on. Web services, just like any new technology, face the perennial problem of requiring manically competitive IT vendors to cooperate on common standards for the good of all.
"There are some Web services security standards that are really, really cool in terms of spec; they give you an impressive pile of paper when you print them out. But to get to the point where our developers can implement them, we are easily nine months to a year away from that," he explains. "The Soap standard is rather complex," he adds. "Time to time there are interoperability issues. One particular server flavour of Soap isn't necessarily 100 percent compatible with some particular flavour of the client. It's an issue for Soap industry in general and there are a lot of efforts underway to make sure there's 100 percent anything to anything connectivity."
But despite these concerns, Amazon's position as one of the biggest e-commerce players in the world -- with around 80 million requests a week -- and an overall master plan to establish itself as the 'key e-commerce platform', Barr claims it's not up to his company to battle for standards.
"Organisations such as IBM, Microsoft and Sun have the resource to devote to standards. It's a significant burden for an organisation wanting to participate in standards effort," he claims. "You need to basically put a person on those efforts almost full-time, which begs the question: 'If they are full-time in the standards committee, how do they accurately represent what their company needs?'
But despite these standards concerns, Web services have been very good for Amazon. Exactly how good, they're not saying but Barr claims people can draw their own conclusions from the alleged success of the programme's participants.
"We don't tend to give out individual numbers for product areas. I know that individual associate sites that have made the upgrade from being associates with simple Amazon banners on their sites to sites with rich product information on them have each seen very, very measurable returns -- sometimes doubling their actual sales or more,' he says.
Never one to rest on its laurels, Amazon is planning to add to add its last two international sites, France and Canada, to the Web Services programme later this year. Barr claims there is no limit to the size of the developer community it can support.
"We have just scratched the surface here, we are just getting started. Thirty thousand is a great number, it's a lot better than zero, but it's a lot smaller than it's going to be two years from now. I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess how big this thing is going to get. We work with Sun's development community and Microsoft's and both of those number in the millions."
Find out more about Web services in this IT Priorities Special Report:
Everything you need to know about Web services
Amazon takes a razor to its homepage
Tesco.com cuts development costs with Web services
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