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?

In September, I was in Kansas City and Seattle; so far in October, I’ve been to Austin and Washington, DC, with a conference in San Francisco, thrown in for good measure in between.

On Monday, I leave DC for three days in Las Vegas, come back to speak at a show in San Jose, where we will be exhibiting, and then leave for a weekend in Orlando nine days later.

For reasons of sanity, I will not be going anywhere for Thanksgiving.

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.]

• 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!

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

My talk is on “Software innovations from the US,” which (fortunately for me) appears to be in English. All the other talks are in German. :) I’m looking forward to seeing my friends at eBay Germany again and meeting a number of new German eBay developers.

Right now, I’m scheduled to work May 26-28, but I will either arrive a few days early or stay a few days late. What should I do? It’s my first time in Germany, so I’m open to anything. I’m trying to stay somewhere near the Dusseldorn / Frankfurt area, so I don’t spend all my time travelling, but I’m open to anything.

Also, if you can’t make it to Dusseldorf, I’m able and willing to talk to any Germany user groups about eBay Web services (or PHP). Let me know if you’re interested in setting up a user group meeting, or you just want to hang out.

I’ve spent many months using ext/soap with eBay’s WSDL writing sample code and testing out various functions. Bit-by-bit I’ve picked up a number of tricks and discovered quite a few un- (or mis- or poorly) documented features. Thanks to this talk, I will finally have the excuse to put them all together in one place.

Here’s the official description:

PHP 5’s ext/soap extension is an excellent Web services client. However, while the easy things are easy, lack of documentation means the hard things can appear downright impossible. Starting with SOAPClient basics and building upwards, learn the hidden secrets necessary to conquer even the strangest WSDL.

The one bad part about this talk is that I won’t be giving “Abracadabra and hocus pocus: Magical methods and PHP 5″ or “Consuming Web Services Using PHP 5.” Of the two, the first would have been a blast to give, but I already have slides for the second, which is nice. (Well, I haven’t heard one way or another about those talks, but I’m assuming they were rejected. That’s fine, since I only have time to prepare one talk.)

See you in Portland!

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.

I really enjoyed the show. Lots of interesting people there. One nice thing about ETech is that there was a little more emphasis on the social instead of the technical. Technology is always fun, but you need to remember why you’re deploying it, and how its design affects the people and groups who interact with it, both positively and negatively.

To that end, I was a little disappointed in the lack of diversity. Delyn guestimated the crowd at only 10% female. Christine backs that up with a slightly more accurate 11.62%. This was even lower than OSBC! I would have thought that ETech would have had more women than the norm.

Besides, after last year’s conversation, I was hoping for more. I just did a rough count of the speaker ratio, and it actually grades out at an improved 15%. (I removed all the paid sponsor slots, since Rael has no control over that.)

As someone who works on my own conference, and has also picked papers for a track at another O’Reilly Convention, I know it’s tough. Frankly, you just don’t get enough submissions by women. And I know Rael’s working on it.

But the show would be far more interesting to me if it had a more diverse set of speakers and attendees. However, that does remind me to review the eBay Developers Conference speaker list before we go final with it.