The new collaborative site, called the eBay Community Codebase, provides a hosted project development environment available to eBay’s 15,000-strong developer network. The site will provide access to eBay’s SOAP and WSDL wrappers, plus a number of sample applications for it and its PayPal subsidiary.
To promote collaboration, eBay is providing several development lifecycle tools on the back end, including source code check in/check out version control systems, bug checking, and feature request tracking.
Code developed through the eBay site must be open sourced, with eBay providing a choice of several open source licenses, some of which include LGPL (Lesser General Public License), MIT, Apache 2.0, PHP and Python.
According to eBay Evangelist Adam Trachtenberg, the licenses were selected because they allow commercial developers to use the source code within the products that they sell.
To date, there are roughly 1,000 live applications developed by community members. According to Trachtenberg, the goal here is to promote greater collaboration by setting up a hosted project development environment based on open source licensing.
In the US, 42% of eBay’s listings are already generated through use of its public web services interfaces.
In conjunction with the eBay announcement, the company’s PayPal business unit is open sourcing five toolkits covering development of payment buttons with integration to instant payment notification systems.
Additionally, they are working with Zend to contribute code to the PEAR::SOFT libraries, which will provide access to SOAP and WSDL web services interfaces to developers using version 4 of PHP, a popular language with web developers.
In effect, it puts PHP 4 on an even level with Java and Microsoft .NET, for which PayPal already provides web services interfaces. Although PayPal hasn’t open-sourced all of its code, according to David Nielsen, manager of the PayPal Developer Network, the goal is to make most of the key PayPal web services components open sourced in the long run.
