With Chrome extensions, developers from outside Google can write software to modify the Chrome experience. Individuals can install these extensions to enable features that are useful to them, but aren’t necessarily of value to everyone who uses Chrome. (Those features are part of what Google will provide.)

A team at eBay has been working on an eBay Chrome extension (what else?), and apparently the Chrome team liked it so much they asked us to come and show-off the eBay extension at their launch event!

Unfortunately, the team lives in London, so they couldn’t fly all the way to California to be there. However, they passed the ball to me, and I agreed to be their talking head for a day.

Overall, my five minutes of Chrome fame went quite well. I talked about why Chrome extensions matter to eBay and also how third party developers can build their own eBay extensions, too. Also, as someone said to me: “they laughed at your jokes.”

But don’t take my word. My wife Beth joined me for the afternoon and took this beautiful flip HD video of my talk. (Warning: the sound is a little low.)

eBay Chrome Extension Demo from Tifton Drive Productions on Vimeo.

Now, as to the Sergey teaser in my headline…

While we were in the event space getting ready for everyone to come in, I looked up and saw a robot heading out of the corner of my eye. It looked like a small screen mounted on a skinny pole that itself was mounted on a wider base of wheels. (Think of a less human looking version of Number 5 from Short Circuit.)

All of a sudden the robot wheeled our way and we could see that there was a TV screen on the top (along with a WiFi router on the back side). Looking at us through the screen were two people. One of whom was Sergey Brin.

Before we could properly process any of those facts — as my post cannot recreate the surrealism of the experience — Sergey started talking and asking us questions. We realized the was a video camera mounted on top of the TV screen, so we were involved in a two-way video chat with Sergey, who was in his office, driving the robot around, and looking for people to talk with.

After some short chitchat, we almost got him to stay for the event, but it was still 30 minutes before kick-off, so he rode off in search of other projects.

After he left, someone else from Google came up to us and said “What did you think?” My reply: It was very on brand — exactly what I expected to find when I came here. :)

I don’t normally comment on these discussions, but there’s a pretty good one right now that I’m enjoying on the screen shot posted under the title a “new split screen GUI” view of eBay.

According to a comment, one person thinks this is some super-secret screen capture ferreted out by someone under NDA. Scot Wingo thinks this is a “snagged screen shot” of a special test “roaming around the playground.”

As usual, the reality is far more mundane. Since the evidence is posted publicly on eBay.com, I’m happy to debunk this.

Go to the eBay investor Web site and check out the “Boston Lunch Presentation” from February 1. (This deck is identical to New York lunch presentation from the day before.) Go to slide 14 “New approach to Fixed Price and Auctions: Early prototype.”

Look familiar?

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?

SOAP is obviously the big one. I use the PHP 5 ext/soap extension, which is great, but there’s actually another PHP SOAP extension that might be even better. No, it’s not PEAR::SOAP or NuSOAP; it’s axis2.

If you haven’t heard of axis2, you’re not alone. That’s because it’s a pecl extension that’s still in beta, so there aren’t a lot of people using it yet. However, it’s a PHP version of the Apache Axis 2.0 SOAP stack.

Unlike ext/soap, which is recreating SOAP one feature at a time, Axis 2.0 already supports a good portion of the WS-* specifications. So all that needs to happen is for someone to write the hooks between PHP and Axis 2.0, which is far easier than actually writing the features themselves.

I met a number of people from WSO2, the company that’s writing Axis 2.0, and they’re quite excited about the extension. However, they did mention it’s still in beta, so I haven’t actually spent any time using it yet.

The other PHP XML extension I’ve been hearing a lot about is SDO. SDO is an attempt to provide a standard data interface regardless of the backend datasource. So, for example, you can interact with XML data in the exact same manner as information pulled from your database.

At OSCON and ApacheCon, I’ve run into a couple of people from IBM who have been doing the heavy lifting on this extension, and we’ve had a number of interesting chats with them about eBay Web services and SDO, but I hadn’t had any free time at work to install the extension.

Therefore, when I had a little free time today between the end of my session and lunch, I sat down and reproduced a short code example that I had wrote using ext/soap with SDO instead.

Here’s the key portion of the original code:

// Print Titles and Mileage
if (isset($response->SearchResultItemArray)) {
    foreach($response->SearchResultItemArray as $item) {
        printf("%s\n\t%d miles\n", $item, $item->ItemSpecific['Mileage']);
    }
}

This iterates through a search result for eBay Motors listings and prints out the title and the mileage for each individual item.

Normally the code would be far more complex, but through a series of ext/soap class mappings I wrote that implement the IteratorAggregate and ArrayAccess interfaces, along with the __toString() magic method, I’ve managed to abstract away a number of the complexities.

Best I can tell, SDO doesn’t give me quite the same level of control, but it does implement a number of these features for me out-of-the-box.

Here’s my rewrite using SDO:

foreach ($root->SearchResultItemArray->SearchResultItem as $item) {
    $title = $item->Item->Title;
    $mileage = $item->ItemSpecific["NameValueList[Name='Mileage']"]->Value[0];
    printf("%s\n\t%d miles\n", $title, $mileage);
}

It’s not quite as brief, but I do get this nice XPath-like filtering that lets me pull out the the value of the car’s Mileage in one line. Pretty handy.

I had to implement the ArrayAccess interface to get this to work under ext/soap, which included this method:

public function offsetGet($name) {
	if (! is_array($this->NameValueList)) {
		$this->NameValueList = array($this->NameValueList);
	}

	foreach ($this->NameValueList as $NameValueList) {
		if ($NameValueList->Name == $name) {
			return $NameValueList->Value;
		}
	}

	return null;
}

Not the hardest thing in the world to write, but this is just one of the custom class maps that will arise in our data schema, and SDO takes care of them all automatically.

Still, right now I think I prefer my ability the greater control I have over the interface with ext/soap. Our SOAP schema isn’t that pretty since there are lots of list, array, and hash wrappers. Through classmaps and interfaces I can turn these into native-looking PHP arrays and hashes.

I may be introducing a leaky abstraction, but I think this is better than exposing a NameValueListArrayType for people to wrangle with.

Like ext/soap, SDO requires you to define your data using an XML Schema. While we actually publish a stand alone XML Schema file, SDO will also happily parse a WSDL file, too, which is nice.

However, it will not directly consume a SOAP message because the WSDL doesn’t include any mention of the SOAP envelope wrapper. I needed to rip out the contents of the SOAP body into a separate XML document in order to get SDO to parse my data. Oddly, this corresponds perfectly with our “XML API,” so I could use that to retrieve properly formatted data that I can pass directly to SDO.

Where SDO really falls down for me is performance. Admittedly, eBay is a pathological case, but our WSDL file is 2.94 Megs in size. When I feed that to SDO, it takes 8.5 seconds to process the XML Schema data. Yikes!

I don’t mind a one-time start up hit, but it doesn’t appear that SDO can cache a parsed version of the schema. In contrast, ext/soap has both an on-disk and in-memory WSDL cache.

This means it takes SDO about 8.7 seconds to process the schema, load in data, and print out the information — and all with locally stored files.

In contrast, ext/soap takes as little as 0.55 seconds to pull in a cached version of the WSDL from the disk, go out over the network to query eBay via SOAP, wait for eBay’s SOAP server to run a database query on its end and send back a SOAP response, parse the SOAP envelope, and print out the exact same data. If I was using the in-memory cache, I think it’d be even faster, and I’m sure the big bottleneck here is talking to eBay.

Now, I’ve spent all of 60 minutes playing with SDO, so it’s quite possible that I’m missing some obvious configuration flag. If not, I hope IBM can do something to help speed up the performance, since while I could probably write a script to break apart our schema to create individual files that contain all the possible types on a per-call basis, I am hoping I don’t need to.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue exploring SDO to see what else I can do with it because I’ve sure I’ve only grazed its surface.

[Update: I cannot get the axis2 extension to compile, despite trying a number of different versions of Axis2c and both Linux and Mac OS X. I may try again tomorrow.]

I’m trying to use PHP 5.2 to talk to Skype via the COM extension and Skype4COM interface.

I’m using this example from the Skype Forum, but I get a COM exception of “Skype client is not installed.”

However, I do have Skype on my machine and I’m not the only one with this problem, so I don’t think I’m completely crazy.

Unfortunately, I don’t normally develop on Windows or Skype, so it’s very hard for me to debug the COM extension. If anyone has some pointers on where I should start, it would be very useful. Thanks!

You probably use exonumia on a regular basis, without even knowing. What is it? To quote Wikipedia:

Items such as bus tokens (transportation tokens), bar or pub tokens, and casino tokens or chips are some of the more common forms of exonumia.

We have a number of Exonumia subcategories. I think my favorite is “Transit Tokens”.

But “So-Called Dollars” is not a bad one, either.

I love eBay.

• 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!

Here’s the key requirements:

• Work with eBay’s Internet Marketing and Product Management teams to define and enable third-party development of applications to drive activity to eBay.com.
• Evangelize and communicate the benefits of developing on the eBay Platform using our Application Programming Interface (API) and other web services to third parties (primarily affiliates) through conference appearances, one-on-one interaction and personal innovation.
• Maintain and continue to develop/streamline the platform access infrastructure for third parties.

And here’s the full description. (If that link doesn’t work, go to ebaycareers.com and search for job “12439BR”.)

If you’re interested, please e-mail me. The domain is “ebay.com” and my username is “atrachtenberg”.

As usual, I had a great time at the show. It was fun to see all my old friends and make new ones.