Using AWS Java SDK with AWS DynamoDB

in this post i show the steps i took to have a look at aws dynamodb by using the java sdk with intellij idea . i know it might be easier to go with the eclipse sdk but since i am loving my intellij idea i wanted to see how far i could get with it.
the first step is to get the sdk. i took the sources from the git here .

i opened the ( maven ) project in intellij and unfortunately saw that my build was failing. i had to disable the gpg signing and increase the heap size used by maven by adding a few arguments to the maven command:

with these arguments in place the build succeeded.

next step i created a new maven project and added the class i found here to create and fill a few tables that are used for several demonstrating purposes as described in the dynamodb developers guide .
after making some small changes to the script it ran successfully. i had to change the loading of the properties file so it could actually find the supplied awscredentials.properties file. the other change was setting the region of the client to ‘eu-west’ like this:

 client.setregion(com.amazonaws.regions.region.getregion(regions.eu_west_1));

after running the class you can view the resulting tables in the dynamodb management console:

when the tables and their content are created we can fire some queries. there are some sample queries in java for this specific dataset here . i created another class with this code and executed it. please don’t forget the adjust the region if you created your tables in another region then the default one (us_east).
the result of running the class should be:

printing item after retrieving it....
isbn s=[111-1111111111]
id n=[101]
authors ss=[[author1]]
title s=[book 101 title]
replydatetime s=[2013-06-05t14:45:19.169z]
message s=[dynamodb thread 1 reply 2 text]
postedby s=[user b]

of course this only scratched the surface of all the stuff dynamodb has to offer but it is a start. from here you can prcoeed with all the other interesting things .