Aug 13 2009
[Tutorial] Amazon SOAP Product Advertising API from Java – Including Signing of Requests with WS-Security
Amazon has made a lot of affiliates unhappy with their updates to the Product Advertising API (ex-Affiliate API). I first covered invoking this API a couple years ago – my, have things changed since then.
On August 15, 2009, Amazon will be requiring all affiliates using the Product Advertising API to digitally sign their API requests. Previously, calls to the web service required only the AWS Access Key ID. Now, affiliates are required to sign the requests with a private key (and supply the AWS Access Key ID!) in order for the request to be accepted.
Unfortunately, many affiliates feel that Amazon has really botched this transition. Very little documentation is available on how to sign requests, and the majority of the responses in the affiliate community forum are unanswered by Amazon staff. Additional bad news for Java users is that Amazon has apparently dropped their Java library (Amazon A2S), which used to nicely abstract the ugliness of making requests to the web service.
In this tutorial, we’ll implement an Amazon Product Advertising API client using Apache Axis2 1.5, invoking the API’s SOAP methods. We’ll sign the requests using a PKCS 12 (.p12) file. Get some popcorn – this is a very long and involved process 
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