They include a new batch of eBay Shopping Web Services that are tuned for faster performance. According to Max Mancini, a principal in the developer program whose formal title is senior director of Disruptive Innovation, the idea is easing access to people who are browsing before they formally sign in to buy or bid on items.
We wanted to make it easier to get into activities that don’t require sign-ups or authentication, he said. According to Mancini, exposing web services to eBay’s site involves lots of moving parts. The key was getting eBay’s internal development team to winnow down the actual number of components that had to be exposed, to boost search and browsing performance. Streamlining actual web service interfaces was especially critical to improving performance for mashups, which grab content from multiple sources.
For instance, a simple call to get status information, such as the current price of an item, and the auction expiration time used to return over a hundred elements. In the new streamlined API, eBay’s developer team reduced them by 60%.
A refined bidding API was also released so you can bid from sites outside eBay. In other words, you might read a blog praising Apple’s new iPhone; with the new capability, a bid could be made directly from the blogger’s web site. The new feature was developed using the recently released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a lighter weight, more graphical alternative to the PDF Reader that is now part of Adobe Digital Edition.
We saw this as having the potential to build a real desktop client, Mancini said.
Additional enhancements were made to help JavaScript and Adobe Flash developers to development apps that run against the eBay commerce environment.
With eBay now sharing up to half or more of the revenue stream that their apps drive to eBay, Mancini said there’s a real business opportunity for developers. Developers can make a lot of money for creating applications that drive activity back to eBay.
