SOAP-Amazon-MerchantTransport

This module provides a simple way to access Amazon's Merchant Services via
SOAP (with MIME attachments). It is based on SOAP::Lite and MIME::Tools.  

The goal behind SOAP::Amazon::MerchantTransport (SAMT) is to provide access to
the SOAP services Amazon provides without having to deal with the
incompatibilities between SOAP::Lite and Amazon's implementation of SOAP. SAMT
tries to bridge the gap and make working with Amazon's SOAP services as easy
as it should be. 

THE SCOPE OF THIS MODULE

This module is to ease the submission of XML Feeds to Amazon.

This module does not write your Amazon XML Feeds, it only simplifies the
submission of those feeds. If you need help writing the Amazon XML Feeds for
pricing, inventory, orders, etc. view the sample feeds in the Amazon
Documentation. Contact your integration manager for access to these.

Also this module does not handle SOAP errors for you. It uses SOAP::Lite
to submit the XML requests and returns a SOAP::SOM object, unless
another handler is specified.

THE NEED

The reason I wrote this module was to ease the pain of trying to use SOAP::Lite
with Amazon's Merchant SOAP Services. As of this writing SOAP::Lite has a hard
time reading WSDL files with MIME bindings. There are also a few other
peculiarities when working with Amazon and SOAP::Lite. 1) The name of 
the method is not the root element of the SOAP Envelope. The 'merchant' header
and the method name are sibling elements. This is not the default when using
SOAP::Lite. 2) They don't send the optional 'start' parameter in the 
'Multipart/Related' header (as recommended by W3 in RFC 2387). 3) The way
they handle mime takes a little bit of trickery.

I hope this module will save other developers the hours of frustration figuring
out all the intricacies of Amazon's SOAP.

VERSION INFORMATION

The current version is 0.2. This module is stable alpha. Most of the major
method Amazon provides are implemented. The biggest omission at the moment is
that the 'postDocumentDownloadAck' is not implemented.

INSTALLATION

To install this module, run the following commands:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install


SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

After installing, you can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

    perldoc SOAP::Amazon::MerchantTransport

You can also look for information at:

    Search CPAN
        http://search.cpan.org/dist/SOAP-Amazon-MerchantTransport

    CPAN Request Tracker:
        http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=SOAP-Amazon-MerchantTransport

    AnnoCPAN, annotated CPAN documentation:
        http://annocpan.org/dist/SOAP-Amazon-MerchantTransport

    CPAN Ratings:
        http://cpanratings.perl.org/d/SOAP-Amazon-MerchantTransport

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2006 Nate Murray

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
