I don’t know if they expanded the number of pages that trigger this feature, if they’ve rolled the code to a larger set of servers, or both.

For example: “bcec” and “pizzetta 211“.

Looking at the Table of Contents, I’m particularly interested in “Appendix A: HTTP status codes and when to use each one.” (Yes, I am serious.)

When I designed “Dude, Where’s My Used Car,” my mashup between eBay Motors and Google Maps, I churned through a number of different ways to signal failure. My biggest issue is that there’s so many places my request can fail, I’m not sure how to “correctly” represent that back inside my mashup.

For example, in response to a user-generated action (such as filling out a form and clicking submit), my mashup initiates a HTTP GET AJAX request (well, AJAJ because I’m using JSON instead of XML) which hits my web server. I then use PHP to parse the request, generate a corresponding SOAP request to eBay’s web service gateway, wait for result, pick it apart and convert the bits I want to JSON. This data is then passed back to the browser, where I (well, Dojo, actually) evals it.

When everything works, everything works.

But what happens when the user enters an invalid ZIP Code? eBay will return an error, and I’d like to proxy this back to the application, so I can toss up a message.

Should I return 200 OK and pass back the message? That’s one option, but I’d prefer not to need to check the data structure to see if I got the normal data I expected or some nasty error instead.

Besides, Dojo lets me specify a separate error handler callback function. It seems a cleaner design to handle all the errors there. But then I can’t return 200. What to use instead? 400 Bad Request?

Then there’s cases where the error is not the user’s fault, but either my fault or eBay’s fault. What should I do if eBay returns a SOAP envelope my PHP script can’t parse? 502 Bad Gateway? Or if the eBay server returns a SOAP Fault? The same 500 Internal Server Error I got back from eBay?

Should I not let my web server’s interaction with eBay bleed back into browser?

Here’s another example: when eBay’s server is too busy, it returns Error Code 10007. I can retry (and hopefully fix the problem) inside of my PHP script without even needing to message back to the browser. But if I did ultimately give up retrying, should I pass back 503 Service Unavailable? Am I on the hook for translating between SOAP and REST in my server-side proxy PHP script?

Maybe I can use 4xx codes for problems which are “user generated” in some form. These are things which require the user to take an action to remedy. And for things which are broken but otherwise outside of the control of the user (such as my SOAP client being unable to understand eBay’s SOAP response) I can use 5xx.

I actually like this idea, but I’m wondering if there’s a “standard” way to indicate errors and failures in a AJAX application. I can’t find one, but I’m not very familiar with what’s out there.

PS: My vote is to leave off the “With Ruby” part of the title, and go with plain “REST Web Services”.

For example, at this year’s ETech, I broke through with a killer presentation titled: “eBay Web Services: A Marketplace Platform for Fun and Profit.”

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Patrick from Google tries to respond at this month’s ZendCon with: “Scrub (Ajax), Wash (SOAP) and REST: use Google Checkout and AdWords APIs with PHP for fun and profit.”

Mixed metaphors and the ugly imagery of Patrick in the shower aside, I am not put off in even a small way by his outright thievery. For I am already sixteen steps ahead.

I am proud to introduce, coming on October 31th, for the very first time, my latest and greatest talk: “eBay Web services: Great platform or greatest platform?”

Truly Lincolnish.

PS: You are only allowed to read this if you have a sense of humor. This is meant to be funny. I don’t think Patrick is going around stealing all my talk titles, or even just my good talk titles. Besides, I am stealing my most recent one from Stephen Cobert, so I can’t really claim ownership to that now can I?

• DC PHP
• ApacheCon
• Zend/PHP Conference

I think I submitted a slightly different abstract for each conference, but the main core of all the presentations is the same: a case study of Dude, Where’s My Used Car, my eBay Motors / Google Maps mashup.

In particular, I show how I’m using the PHP 5 SOAP extension alongside magical methods and other PHP 5 goodness to provide a simple interface into eBay Web services. If you’ve never played with either ext/soap, the new OOP features, or SPL, then my goal is to introduce you to all the cool things they enable — things you cannot do in PHP 4.

If I get a chance to rewrite the front end AJAX code using a nice library, such as Dojo or YUI, I’ll show how I bind the data between the client and the server. Right now, the that particular code is handrolled, and totally sucks, so I won’t be showing that off. :)

If you’re going to ApacheCon, I am looking to roadtrip to Lockhart, TX for a little bit of BBQ. Let me know if you’re interesting in coming along, of if you can suggest someplace else to go instead.

All three conferences have posted their schedules and all three look great! With one of the east coast, one in the middle of the US, and one on the west coast, there’s bound to be a show close to you. Sign up, come on by, and say hello!

Clicking on the [+] expands the image:

This is just a fixed image, not a AJAX scrolling panel. Clicking on the map sends you to the full AJAXy Google Maps site.

Interestingly enough, this feature went away when I logged out, so it may or may not work for you.

Yesterday, was the big Bill G keynote and 1-1 chat with Tim O’Reilly. During Bill’s opening remarks, he gave the eBay Web service a nice plug by saying “eBay is an extreme example where half the product listings are done in a programmable way.” Technically, it’s 47% of eBay.com listings, but what’s 3% among friends?

Later on, Dean Hachamovitch, king of IE 7, showed off eBay’s new support for viewing search results via RSS directly within the browser. Even better, we’ve integrated support for Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions to RSS, so you can sort and filter eBay items by category, format, price, etc. I think it’s a great way of using RSS outside of news syndication.

After lunch, I was on a panel titled “Web 2.0: Show Me The Money,” with Tim O’Reilly, Jeremy Zawodny, Michael Arrington, and Royal Farros. At first, I was worried we couldn’t fill up the entire hour and fifteen minutes, but we actually ran three minutes late and could have kept going. I don’t know if that was a good or bad thing, but a number of people have come up to me after the panel to say they enjoyed it, so I’m going to assume we were at least entertaining, if not actually informative.

Here’s the round-up from the blogsphere:

• Jeremy Zawodny
• Joe Duck
• Luc Van Braekel
• Randy Holloway

I hustled from my panel to Christin Boyd’s Office 2007 talk, where she demoed (in grand style) an eBay and Outlook integration, where you can pull in the items your watching and bidding on from eBay directly into Outlook. They appear directly inside a folder that you can sort, label, etc. Even better, they appear on your calendar, so you get a reminder 15 minutes before the auction closes. She even overwrote the “Reply” button on the ribbon turning it into a “Bid on eBay” button. Quite cool!

This morning, Joe Belfiore demoed this in front of the entire MIX 06 crowd during his morning keynote as an example of Office integration with third party sites using Web services.

Right now, I’m taking a short break before lunch, and then I’m off to hear Alan Lewis demo his eBay Live.Com Gadget. He’s learned all sorts of practical information about combining widgets and gadgets with Web services, and he’s going to share best practices with the attendees.

I got a chance to play around with the gadget over the past week, and it’s quite nice. Kudos to Alan, Rob, and Tim, for the design, programming, and UI. They really took this from idea to concept to actual code all by themselves. In particular, they added this nifty feature where the gadget will intelligently expand and truncate the search results depending on the width of your screen. Very impressive.

If you’ve made it this far, I’ll share my one Vegas celebrity almost sighting. Yes, a real “appears in the National Enquirer” celebrity, not a tech “has an a-list blog” celebrity. While we were at dinner last night, Britney Spears rolled into the restaurant. Unfortunately, no thanks can be shared with “It’s 30 seconds too late, but now’s when I’m going to mention this” Arturo, who didn’t alert the people at the table with our backs to the entrance. I admit to shamlessly trying to “go to the bathroom,” but she was hidden away in a private room, and the bathrooms are in the casino, so that line didn’t work so well.

It’s quite nice and takes advantage of a not-well-announced new rate limiting feature that you should expect to learn more about later this month. :) No particular reason for the suspense, except that I’ve been too busy to give it the proper attention it needs.

If you’re the type of person that runs Google Desktop and uses eBay, you should pick it up.

Like all Web 2.0 concepts, it’s in perpetual beta. (Why does “perpetual beta” seem like the Web 2.0 phrase for Web 1.0’s “Under Construction” image?) Thanks to a helpful prod, I sat down this morning and fixed the outstanding IE bugs, so now it works in IE, Firefox, and Safari. That means I can officially blog about it.

For those of you interested in the technical details, the backend code is written in PHP 5. I’m using the ext/soap extension to talk with eBay Web services and PEAR’s HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Javascript, and Date packages. I tried to use HTML_AJAX, but it was buggy when I first tried it; I see there have been many recent updates, so I should look again.

Not surprisingly, writing the PHP part was pretty easy. It was the JavaScript code that took forever and a day to write and debug. Many thanks to the QuirksMode Web site for documenting cross-browser woes.

Please check out the site and let me know what you think.

BTW, Web 2.0 is jam packed with people. Sessions are SRO. This is the second conference I went to in the past month (Microsoft PDC being the other) that sold out. I’m hoping this is a sign that the tech industry is on an upswing.

PS: I promise I will blog about something other than when I’m speaking real soon. I have some thoughts surrounding Web services and mashups that I’m going to try out in the panel. Nothing brilliant, but some thoughts I had from working on a little application. If I don’t get shouted down, I’m going to put them out there.