amazon - Prendre un Café

Hey, this is a post written in english. Handle with care

I've just released an alpha version of a new plugin for the Symfony framework to use the brand new Amazon SimpleDB service : sfAmazonSimpleDBPlugin. This plugin is in an alpha state but provide a clean and Symfony-compliant API to handle and query your SimpleDB database, if you have the luck to have an account.

The purpose of SimpleDB is to provide simple and efficient data storage through a webservice. You can find billing policy on their website.

I've mainly used the PHP5 library provided by Amazon (API documentation available), but I thought some operations were a bit complicated.

For example, with the official client, to insert a row in a table you have to do something like this :

<?php
require_once ('Amazon/SimpleDB/Model/ReplaceableAttribute.php');
$domainName = 'MyStore';
$itemName = 'Item_01';
$attribute1 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute1->withName('Category')->withValue('Clothes');
$attribute2 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute2->withName('Subcategory')->withValue('Sweater');
$attribute3 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute3->withName('Name')->withValue('Cathair Sweater');
$attribute4 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute4->withName('Color')->withValue('Siamese');
$attribute5 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute5->withName('Size')->withValue('Small');
$attribute6 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute6->withName('Size')->withValue('Medium');
$attribute7 = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_ReplaceableAttribute();
$attribute7->withName('Size')->withValue('Large');
$attributeList = array($attribute1, $attribute2, $attribute3, $attribute4, $attribute5, $attribute6, $attribute7);
$action = new Amazon_SimpleDB_Model_PutAttributes();
$action->withDomainName($domainName)->withItemName($itemName)->setAttribute($attributeList);
invokePutAttributes($service, $action);

With the Symfony plugin, you can do the same with :

<?php
$data = array('Category'    => 'Clothes',
              'Subcategory' => 'Sweater',
              'Name'        => 'Cathair Sweater',
              'Color'       => 'Siamese',
              'Size'        => array('Small', 'Medium', 'Large'));
sfAmazonSimpleDBClient::getInstance()->selectDomain('MyStore')->putAttributes('Item_01', $data);

Personnaly I prefer the shorter syntax but it's mainly matter of taste here. In a future release, I'll try to also provide a backend module to handle the databases.

Last but not least, the plugin API is entirely unit tested. You can find the test suite here.

I hope you'll find this plugin somewhat useful for your Symfony projects

Edit : The author of the official Amazon PHP library sent me a mail to clarify a point : there's an alternative syntax available, array based, to put attributes:

$action = array ( "DomainName" =>  $domainName,
            "ItemName" =>    $itemName,
            "Attribute" = >  array(
                        array ("Name" => "Category", "Value" => "Clothes"),
                        array ("Name" => "Subcategory", "Value" => "Sweater"),
                        array ("Name" => "Name", "Value" => "Cathair Sweater"),
                        array ("Name" => "Color", "Value" => "Siamese"),           
                        array ("Name" => "Size", "Value" => "Small"),   
                        array ("Name" => "Size", "Value" => "Medium"),
                        array ("Name" => "Size", "Value" => "Large"))
            );
$service->putAttributes($action);

So next step for me, I'd like to ORMize all this to be able to do some pretty things like:

$product = new Product();
$product->setCategory('Clothes');
$product->setSubcategory('Sweater');
$product->setName('Cathair Sweater');
$product->setColor('Siamese');
$product->setSize(array('Small', 'Medium', 'Large'));
$product->save();