Archive for September, 2005

Mobile Software Value Chain

September 25th, 2005 • • Comments Off on Mobile Software Value Chain • Related • Filed Under

I almost forgot to mention that I’m speaking at 4 pm on Monday on "M-Commerce Trends and Challenges" at CTIA.

Jon Udell on SOA

September 25th, 2005 • • Comments Off on Jon Udell on SOA • Related • Filed Under

Jon Udell wrote a nice piece in Infoworld on SOA (aka Web services), where he talks about the SOAP vs. REST camps and also investigates some of the new Web Services standards (WS-*) that Microsoft and IBM have been pushing. (BTW, I consider eBay’s “XML API” to be more similar to REST than SOAP.)

It’s a good business-level overview of what’s going on in Web services, and includes a few business examples of people using WS-* in the wild. (i.e. actual deployed programs, not made up “proof of concepts.”)

Additionally, eBay Web services gets a small mention at the top of page 2:

Today’s most visible exemplars of WS-Lite — Amazon and eBay — use Web services in a point-to-point way. In that mode there’s not much difference between SOAP/WSDL APIs and REST APIs, so it’s not surprising that developers who work with these platforms overwhelmingly prefer the REST flavor.

Jon blogged about the article, where he provides some background on the piece. His post include a link to his excellent Bill Gates interview from last week’s Microsoft PDC.

Zend/PHP Conference Coming Soon!

September 23rd, 2005 • • Comments Off on Zend/PHP Conference Coming Soon! • Related • Filed Under

I just checked my calendar and was shocked to discover the Zend/PHP Conference is just around the corner — October 18-21.

I’ve been part of a team of people from the PHP community working for months with Zend (including Zeev and Andi) to help put together a great business-focused PHP conference. I’m really excited for this show.

There are lots of great PHP conferences, but this is the only one emphasizing PHP inside large and medium sized business. There’s still great technical content (Wez on PDO, Chris Shiflett on Security, Andrei and Andi on Unicode, George on Building Scalable PHP Applications). However, I’ve already heard those talks before. :)

What I’m going to attend are all the new talks. Such as, John Allspaw from Yahoo! on their LAMP hardware layout, John Roberts from SugarCRM on building a commercial business on top of an open source application, and Jeff Winner from Propel on Managing Development and Operations Together.

Of course, I’m also going to the Empowering eBay Research with PHP and Web Services session. I’m doing the intro, and then quickly getting out of the way for Andrew. He founded Terapeak. Terapeak is providing some amazing data analysis tools that crunch the gadzillion mega-bytes of active and closed listing data to help eBay sellers (among others) determine the state of eBay and the economy. There’s no better way to see buying and selling trends that to look at our data, and Terapeak is all based on PHP.

Come to the show. When I’m not in a session, I’ll be at the eBay/PayPal booth in the exhibit hall, and I’d love to chat.

Open Source vs. Shared Software Services

September 19th, 2005 • • Comments Off on Open Source vs. Shared Software Services • Related • Filed Under

I’m back from LA and I’m trying to find the time to write up my thoughts on PDC, LA, and web services.

In the meantime, I’d like to share this quote from Brad Felt from his PDC write up:

Now – if we can only get them to say “Open Source” instead of “Shared Software Services” life would be a little easier

It’d be even funnier if it wasn’t true. :)

Hello from PDC

September 14th, 2005 • • Comments Off on Hello from PDC • Related • Filed Under

I’m down in LA this week for Microsoft PDC. We’ve got a kiosk in the Vista area, so if you’re in town, come on by and say hello to the team.

I’ll try and write something up while I’m at the show, but there’s nothing like 6,500 geeks slamming a convention center T1 line to kill your Internet connection, so updates will be spotty.

Apple Webkit Bug of the Week

September 11th, 2005 • • 2 comments • Related • Filed Under

It’s not Friday, but here is my Apple bug of the week: “offsetTop values incorrect for tr elements“.

We buy lots of ads

September 8th, 2005 • • Comments Off on We buy lots of ads • Related • Filed Under

I’ve always known that eBay buys lots of pay-per-click ads, but here are the numbers to prove it.

Not only is eBay #1 by a long margin, we just closed the deal last month to buy up #2 Shopping.com. Combined we buy over 5x more than the next closest company, IAC. That’s a lot of ads.

(The standard disclaimer applies: everything in this post only applies to the public data from Nielsen/NetRatings. I have no knowledge if what they provide is accurate in any shape or form.)