Amazon today launched the developer preview of its AWS SDK for JavaScript. With this, developers can now easily build dynamic JavaScript applications that can access AWS services from the browser without the need to write any server-side code and to configure an application server for hosting.
Amazon previously launched an SDK for Node.js apps, so this isn’t Amazon’s first foray into supporting JavaScript. Indeed, it turns out that this new SDK uses the same programming model in the browser and in server-side Node.js code.
With this new SDK, developers can make direct calls to Amazon’s S3 storage services, Amazon SQS for reading from and writing to message queues, SNS for generating and processing mobile notifications and to Amazon’s DynamoDB NoSQL database. Access to Amazon’s more traditional database services is not currently an option. This means developers can now build JavaScript apps that can create and popular S3 buckets, for example, and query DynamoDB tables without the need to access these services through any server-side code.
To access these features, developers need to add a tag that integrate’s Amazon’s JavaScript library into their code. The SDK supports Amazon’s web identity federation feature (you wouldn’t want to add your AWS credentials in your HTML and JavaScript, after all). By doing this, you can also use a public identity provider like Facebook, Google or – of course – Amazon itself.
As with all things Amazon, the setup isn’t completely trivial, but the company has created a number of tutorials that will get you started.