Amazon SQS launched over three years ago and is the quiet workhorse behind many of the highly scalable applications running on Amazon EC2.

Today Amazon is rolling out some important new features for Amazon SQS including availability from within our EU region, control of access permissions, and more control over the visibility timeout.

Starting today, a complete, self-contained instance of Amazon SQS is available in Europe. You can now choose to build Amazon SQS-driven applications entirely based in Europe or span regions (US and EU) in order to provide geographic diversity.

AWS is also introducing additional permission features that control access to Amazon SQS and to each of its fundamental actions on a very fine-grained basis … Continue reading…

Cloudfork AWS is a new open source project that provides easy access from Smalltalk to the Amazon Web Services that are related to cloud computing. The following services are supported: SimpleDB, SQS, S3.

The code is hosted on Squeaksource. The plan is to port Cloudfork AWS to other Smalltalk dialects as soon as the code is reasonably stable. The goal of the Cloudfork AWS project is simply to make the API’s easily usable from Smalltalk. 

Here’s the official blog of the project.