eBay Application Development [Paperback]

Ray Rischpater (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590593014 | ISBN-13: 978-1590593011 | Publication Date: March 12, 2004 | Edition: 1

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE to have a piece of the action involving one of today’s largest online marketplaces? Perhaps you’ve got an idea for an innovative electronic storefront, but don’t want to build the back end or try to build 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. Or perhaps you have another idea altogether, and just need the customers to support it. Look no further than eBay. With the eBay Software Developer’s 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, 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.

Editorial Reviews

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

About the Author

Ray Rischpater - is a freelance consultant and author with over eight years' experience writing about and developing for handheld computing platforms. During this time, Ray has participated in the development of Internet technologies for the J2ME, QUALCOMM BREW, Palm OS, Newton, Magic Cap, and proprietary operating systems for vertical handheld computers, as well as consulted during the development of Web sites for wireless devices using HTML and WAP. Ray is currently a senior software engineer at Rocket Mobile Inc. and holds a bachelor's degree in Pure Mathematics from UC Santa Cruz. He is also the author of Wireless Web Development, Second Edition (Apress, 2002), and Wireless Web Development with PHP and WAP (Apress, 2001).

Product Details

• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590593014
• ISBN-13: 978-1590593011
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,935,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best hardcopy resource for Ebay SDK., November 29, 2004

By 

P. Rogers - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: eBay Application Development (Paperback)

This is may be the only hard copy resource for information on the Ebay SDK and API. I found this book easy to follow and well organized. The samples were easy to understand and to the
point. The samples in the book are written in C# and PHP and are followed by detailed sections on what each part of the code does. I found using this book was much easier than trying to
navigate the Ebay documentation.

The book is seperated into basically two sections one focused on the SDK and the other focused the API. The part I found most useful was the chapter on the Integration Library. This chapter dicusses synchronizing data between your application and Ebay. This chapter alone will get you thinking of any number of useful applications you could build. The examples were very useful in providing an understanding of the Integration Library. If you are doing any Ebay development work this is an invaluable resource.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Use an XML feed or an SDK, April 16, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: eBay Application Development (Paperback)

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.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars OK overview, but stops short... not real pleased, May 3, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: eBay Application Development (Paperback)

This book provides a decent overview of eBay development, but it stops short of providing many direct solutions to programming issues. It's more of a reference (which it does an ok job of being), full of tables of values, etc. However, that's all available in eBay's documentation.

I was not at all happy with the author's use of C# psudo-code rather than showing actual code. Did he have some super-secret app that he didn't want to share? I downloaded the code from the web site, but there were many examples that did not work.

Your choices with this book are C# and Pearl. There's not a line of VB.NET. Also, the web site only give you the sample code... nothing up there about new changes (such as Auth & Auth) that eBay has recently added.

Overall, I'm not really happy with this book. It feels like it was released to get something out there first, not best.