Amazon Rank Widget

Mike Potter encouraged me with his post about The Most Popular Flex or Actionscript Book to build an online Amazon Ranking application. I wanted to know if he was using an existing tool to do this or if he was doing it manually. Sure enough, Mike replied that every month he would visit each of the product pages and put the rank result into an Excel spreadsheet.

I emailed him back saying that I was interested in creating an online app that would streamline the process via Amazon's Ecommerce Service. He replied with encouragement to create a Flex widget that could be placed on a webpage that would show some books sorted in their Sales Rank order. The user would be able to see an image of each item as well as click on it to go the Amazon detail page. The owner of the website would specify the list of ASINs or ISBNs in an XML file for the widget to lookup.

I am very very new to Flex and have only been working with it on a project at work for a few weeks. This afternoon, I couldn't wait to take on Mike Potter's suggestion in beginning the work of this widget. What I am showing below is obviously not what the widget is going to look like but rather just the basic code that pulls a list of ASINs from an XML file and looks them all up on Amazon and displays them here.