Amazon vs. Apache - my Base64 is better than your Base64

October 12, 2009 10:00.57 PM

I had my fair share of writing Amazon Web Services applications and recently decided to try again. Amazon decided to make some changes and require all developers to sign every application before making the request with a mix of algorithms including Base64'ing the entire signature before sending. This sounds easy and in fact, is easy, EXCEPT when you use the incorrect libraries.

I'm a big fan of reuse so I tried using the Apache Commons Codec library. This failed. I tried downloading the Amazon examples. This failed again. I finally noticed after five attempts and three nights of misery that the examples used the commons-codec-1.3 while I was using the newest release, commons-codec-1.4.

After a quick swap of the libraries on the classpath, my code worked like a charm. Whatever happened here, it is not in sync with Amazon's Base64(I'm guessing) algorithm.