I got pretty excited about Node.js during the last day, especially after discovering that there are already a whole bunch of modules available for it:

http://github.com/ry/node/wiki/modules

I needed clients for both Amazon EC2 and the Product Advertising API so I had a closer look at Blake Mizerany’s swirl-node. As swirl-node only supports EC2 calls I decided to code my own little module. I thought it would be best to have a generic part every Amazon API requires and more specific parts for EC2, Product Advertising and what else I may need in the future.

After a few hours of hacking and browsing the Node.js documentation I finally got it working.

Some simple usage examples:

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var aws = require("./lib/node-aws");


ec2 = aws.createEC2Client(yourAccessKeyId, yourSecretAccessKey);
ec2.call("DescribeInstances", {}, function(result) {
console.log(JSON.stringify(result));
})

Returns you details about your EC2 instances:

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[...]
{"item":{
"instanceId":"i-acb2d1db","imageId":"ami-03765c77",
"instanceState": {"code":"80","name":"stopped"},
"privateDnsName":{},"dnsName":{},
"reason":"User initiated (2010-07-28 19:37:54 GMT)"
[...]

or when using the Product Advertising API:

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prodAdv = aws.createProdAdvClient(yourAccessKeyId, yourSecretAccessKey, yourAssociateTag);
prodAdv.call("ItemSearch", {SearchIndex: "Books", Keywords: "Javascript"}, function(result) {
console.log(JSON.stringify(result));
})

In fact returns you a long list of Books with details…

Everyone who needs something similar can give it a try at github and hopefully give me feedback:

http://github.com/livelycode/aws-lib