eBay Application Development

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 308 pages
• Published by: Apress
• Edition: 1st Edition March 12, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1590593014
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1590593011
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product Description


How would you like to have a piece of the action involving one of today's largest online marketplaces? Perhaps you have an idea for an innovative electronic storefront, but you don't want to build the back-end or try to implement the marketing campaign you need to attract the millions of users that you know you'll please.

Or maybe you're looking to integrate your enterprise with an existing e-tailer. Perhaps you have another idea altogether and just need the customers to support it. Look no further than eBay! With the eBay software Development Kit (SDK) and lower-level web-based application programming interface (API), you can craft applications that tap eBay's vast product, server, and customer resources. Your application can be hosted on a web server, on your customers' desktop workstations, or on the latest mobile gadgets such as a personal digital assistant or smart phone.

eBay Application Development shows you how to do just that. After reading this book, you'll understand what the eBay interfaces provide through both their SDK and their API; how you can partner with eBay to design, develop, certify, and deploy your application; and, most important, the technical nuts-and-bolts behind actually writing applications that use both the SDK and API.

From the Author
Dear Reader,

It’s rare for a company to open access to its entire customer base and business model to the general public. That’s why I was excited when eBay, one of the Web’s most successful companies, did just this with the public release of the eBay software Development Kit and the eBay Application Programming Interfaces. Using these tools, you can integrate eBay’s customers and services with your Web site and inventory system, or even write your own stand-alone applications that eBay buyers and sellers can use to enhance their eBay experience.

The potential for new applications is staggering, because eBay has already established a loyal customer base for their service. However, like any new platform, it takes time for you to learn the ins and outs of the various interfaces and how they fit with your application. That’s why I wrote this book: to help you get oriented within the world of eBay application development and to speed your application to market.

As a software developer and user of eBay, I look forward to seeing what applications you create with the eBay interfaces and what you learn from this book!

Ray Rischpater

Reader Reviews
One of the great successes online is eBay. A not-so-small cottage industry has arisen to help users buy or sell more easily. Of this, an important subset handles cases where users are companies that might want to integrate and automate their inventory needs with eBay. Rischpater points out that there are two ways to do this. The first, and chronologically it certainly was, is to write code that screen scraps eBay pages and extracts the desired data. Brittle. Because when eBay changes the layout, it breaks the scraping and you have to recode. There is also a problem for eBay. If you scrape, you end up discarding most of the page, like the HTML formatting commands. Unnecessary bandwidth usage, on both your end and eBay's. More burden on their servers. The problem for eBay is that it cannot stop scraping. Indistinguishable from users manually requesting pages. So in part because of this, eBay offers an XML data feed and a higher level Software Development Kit (SDK). The XML feed is conceptually the simplest and also the most general, for your computer operating system and language can be anything that has an XML parser. Like linux and C++ or Java, for example. If you already know XML, this will be easy. But the bulk of his presentation centres around using the SDK. This is a set of .NET assemblies (class libraries). So you are restricted to running your application on Microsoft Windows, because currently that is the only thing that supports .NET. But one of the virtues of .NET is that it supports a host of languages, like C, C++. C# and Perl. He strongly suggests that you consider using the SDK, and an associated library, because these are well debugged by eBay and offer functionality that has been found to be broadly useful by many developers. Whereas using the raw XML feed requires you to replicate some or most of this functionality. Still, both are good choices, as compared to screen scraping. The book's explanations are good enough that you can tackle either.