While I was poking through the Amazon Web Services, trying to get ISBNs from rough book titles, I noticed the Amazon Simple Queue Service. Now I remembered when this came out originally, and like most people I went "huh, that's not books" and forgot about it. Recently I've become a great believer in how messaging systems are changing the way we work. I tried to push messaging a lot in my last job, but didn't quite get where I wanted to be. The big problems with a messaging system is that a) you have to install it and b) it has to be reliable. What if these problems were solved? Well Amazon must use messaging internally, and decided to expose their system to the rest of us.
Enter Net::Amazon::SimpleQueue, a wrapper to the Amazon Simple Queue Service. The messaging system is now a web service. Interestingly they expose it as both a SOAP and a REST (ok, not really REST as everything is a GET) service. Now this won't solve all your messaging needs (there are some limitations), but it's fast and reliable. What if you could use Amazon for infrastructure? As an aside, the Amazon Web Services Blog has been fairly interesting recently.
Now I haven't seen many uses of the service yet, but that's because there wasn't a simple Perl interface. Now there is, so go get hacking!
