Querying Amazon with Flash

You've probably heard the term Web services and wondered what all the fuss was about. A Web service is a way for you to request information from another computer system. They work over the Internet and use XML to deliver their content. You send off a request and you receive the results in an XML format. You can use Web services to look up lots of different types of information including currency exchanges, television guides, movie reviews and weather updates.

In this tutorial, we'll look at how you can query the Amazon Web services using Flash. This tutorial assumes that you have Flash MX 2004 Professional. You'll need this version, because we're going to use the XMLConnector component to load the data. The tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of XML files. You'll also need some kind of Web server and server-side language to make the request. I'll be using IIS with ASP.NET in my examples.