It’s Only Software

A while ago, I had written up a tutorial on accessing the TinyURL API from Java. I was recently playing with the bit.ly API and decided to write up a quick tutorial on generating bit.ly URLs from Java.

Why bit.ly?

Since Twitter switched from TinyURL to bit.ly, I decided I’d take a look at it. Personally, I love the stats tracking features of bit.ly, and the ability to store history, and parse the results of the API call in XML or JSON (I use XML in this tutorial).

What you Need

First, you’ll need a bit.ly account in order to be assigned an API key. Your API key will show up under the “API Key” heading in your bit.ly account page.

You’ll also need the Apache Commons HTTP (3.x) library and a recent version of Java.

Calling bit.ly’s REST API

bit.ly’s API is slightly more complex than TinyURL’s, but only very slightly so. Here’s an example of calling the API:

		HttpClient httpclient = new HttpClient();
		HttpMethod method = new GetMethod("http://api.bit.ly/shorten");
		method.setQueryString(
				new NameValuePair[]{
						new NameValuePair("longUrl","http://www.amazon.com/),
						new NameValuePair("version","2.0.1"),
						new NameValuePair("login","mybitlylogin"),
						new NameValuePair("apiKey","R_abcdefmyguid"),
						new NameValuePair("format","xml"),
						new NameValuePair("history","1")
						}
				);
		httpclient.executeMethod(method);
		String responseXml = method.getResponseBodyAsString();

Obviously, you would substitute “login” with your bit.ly login name, and “apiKey” with your API key. This will result in the “longUrl” you pass being returned in an XML structure that looks like the following:

<bitly>
	<errorCode>0</errorCode>
	<errorMessage></errorMessage>
	<results>
		<nodeKeyVal>
			<userHash>JTKXY</userHash>
			<shortKeywordUrl></shortKeywordUrl>
			<hash>1L2iWb</hash>
			<nodeKey><![CDATA[http://www.amazon.com/]]></nodeKey>
			<shortUrl>http://bit.ly/JTKXY</shortUrl>
		</nodeKeyVal>
	</results>
	<statusCode>OK</statusCode>
</bitly>

Processing the Returned XML

To do a “dumb” processing of the returned XML, we can simply do something like the following (depending on what XML APIs you have available, you can get much more sophisticated ):

		String retVal = null;
		if(responseXml != null) {
			// parse the XML
			DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
			DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
			StringReader st = new StringReader(responseXml);
			Document d = db.parse(new InputSource(st));
			NodeList nl = d.getElementsByTagName("shortUrl");
			if(nl != null) {
				Node n = nl.item(0);
				retVal = n.getTextContent();
			}
		}
 
		return retVal;

It appears there is also a very early stage project at Google Code called “bitlyj”, which seems to offer a very straightforward API. I’ll try to post a tutorial for this soon, in the meantime, feel free to check it out here: bitlyj at Google Code. As always, feedback is appreciated!

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 Continue reading “[Tutorial] Amazon SOAP Product Advertising API from Java – Including Signing of Requests with WS-Security”

TinyURL is a service that has been around for a while, but recently regained popularity due to its widespread use on Twitter.

Recently, I poked around and wrote up a simple Java method to, given a URL (TinyURL supports only GET requests), generate a TinyURL from it in Java. This is really the only “API” supported by the TinyURL service, but it’s a handy one!

You’ll need Apache HttpClient 3.1 for this.

Without further ado, here’s the code:

import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpException;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethod;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.NameValuePair;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod;
 
public abstract class TinyURLUtils {
	public static String getTinyUrl(String fullUrl) throws HttpException, IOException {
		HttpClient httpclient = new HttpClient();
 
		// Prepare a request object
		HttpMethod method = new GetMethod("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php"); 
		method.setQueryString(new NameValuePair[]{new NameValuePair("url",fullUrl)});
		httpclient.executeMethod(method);
		String tinyUrl = method.getResponseBodyAsString();
		method.releaseConnection();
		return tinyUrl;
	}
}

Then you’d call the method as follows:

String tinyUrl = TinyURLUtils.getTinyUrl("http://www.mularien.com/blog/");
System.out.println(tinyUrl); // --> http://tinyurl.com/5cporq

You’re welcome to use / improve this code in any way (obviously, I didn’t consider or care about proper exception handling), ideally linking to my blog as the source.

Enjoy!

Note that this makes an HTTP request directly, so this will require some modification if you’re making the call from behind a proxy server. If there’s a need, I can post a follow-up entry on how to set up a proxy server with Apache HTTP Client.

Really, this is so easy it’s almost not worthy of a blog post. Twitter4J is a tiny library wrapping interaction with Twitter APIs.

Creating a new tweet is as simple as:

	    Twitter twitter = new Twitter("username","password");
	    Status status = twitter.update(title);

The Twitter4J page has a series of simple examples covering timelines and direct messages. Great job and thanks to Yusuke Yamamoto, the author.

August 15, 2009: Important update to this article: Amazon now requires signed SOAP requests, which are not supported by the (now defunct) AmazonA2SClient library. Please see my updated article on using the Amazon AWS API (now Product Advertising API) with Java and Apache Axis2. Thanks!

On a side project recently, I decided to try out the Amazon Associates Web Service API, a Java library provided by Amazon which wraps the Amazon Associates Web Service calls with a friendly Java API.

For those who are considering integration with Amazon Associates Web Services (used for things as item search, item detail retrieval, and cart manipulation), this API provides a very deep and rich integration with Amazon, with a relatively shallow learning curve. I’ll provide a simple example here of doing an item lookup by ASIN (Amazon’s unique product IDs), and point you around some of the data structures you’ll encounter when dealing with ASINs.

Continue reading “5 Minute Guide to the Java Amazon Associates Web Service API”