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The Amazon S3 architecture is designed to be programming language-neutral, using our supported interfaces to store and retrieve objects.
Amazon S3 currently provides a REST and a SOAP interface. They are very similar, but there are some differences. For example, in the REST interface, metadata is returned in HTTP headers. Because we only support HTTP requests of up to 4k (not including the body), the amount of metadata you can supply is restricted.
The REST API is an HTTP interface to Amazon S3. Using REST, you use standard HTTP requests to create, fetch, and delete buckets and objects.
You can use any toolkit that supports HTTP to use the REST API. You can even use a browser to fetch objects, as long as they are anonymously readable.
The REST API uses the standard HTTP headers and status codes, so that standard browsers and toolkits work as expected. In some areas, we have added functionality to HTTP (for example, we added headers to support access control). In these cases, we have done our best to add the new functionality in a way that matched the style of standard HTTP usage.
The SOAP API provides a SOAP 1.1 interface using document literal encoding. The most common way to use SOAP is to download the WSDL (go to http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl), use a SOAP toolkit such as Apache Axis or Microsoft .NET to create bindings, and then write code that uses the bindings to call Amazon S3.
