2009 August

AWS PHP5 Libraries as svn:externals

Many of Amazon's official PHP5 libraries for Amazon Web Services are now available (unofficially) for use as Subversion svn:externals.

To add to your SVN-managed project, just do something like this:

svn propedit svn:externals library

And add:

Amazon http://killersoft.googlecode.com/svn/AWS/tags/update-2009-05-15/Amazon

This assumes, of course, that you're keeping your external libraries in a directory called "library" (many Zend Framework-based projects are laid out like this). Adjust to suit your own needs if necessary.

I'm not wild about the code layout of Amazon's official libraries. They're more verbose and cumbersome than a many other wrappers that have been created around Amazon services. However, in the end I choose to use them despite that, for one reason: they're the official libraries.

They're updated more often than any other set of PHP libraries for AWS. In fact, they're often updated on the same day that API changes are released for the underlying services. And, they're comprehensive; many AWS libraries wrap "the easy stuff" or "the commonly used" stuff, but leave you on your own if you actually need to do something non-easy or uncommon.

So, my suggestion is to use these. Hopefully having them in all in a single, easy-to-include place will make life easier for you. It has for me!

My plan for keeping these current is to create a new "update-[date]" tag whenever any of the libraries are updated, with the date of the most recently updated library as part of the directory name. Details about what's actually changed within the update tag will be documented in a README.txt file in the top level.

You can find the "ground zero" update for the AWS libraries in update-2009-05-15, browseable here.