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.