The project formerly known as "Project San Dimas" is all grown up now is now officially called "eBay Desktop".
Looks like we did something right. The project has even moved from it's old domain, www.projectsandimas.com to it's own website as a subdomain of eBay! You can now download Project San Dimas eBay Desktop from http://desktop.ebay.com! Take 'er for a spin and give Alan Lewis (eBay PM for the project) some feedback.
Charles
Looks like there's a new eBay API available from the eBay Developers Site. It is a much simpler name-value-pair-based API and my friend Alan Lewis, from eBay has just uploaded a shiny new Actionscript eBay Library. It's an upgrade from the previous library I wrote which was based on the older version of the API. Check out the blog post on the developers site and try it out for yourself!
Charles
I came across the Google Gadgets API today while I was working on my eBay library and I had a silly notion...why not utilize the eBay library together with the Google Gadgets API and create an eBay Gadget! So I did! It's actually very simple and more of a proof-of-concept than anything else, but it works and I think it's actually quite neat.
In a nutshell, the gadget will allow you to search for items, view item details, and even add and remove them from your personalized watchlist. And, as an added bonus, since it uses the Google Gadgets API, this gadget can be used on Google's Personalized Homepage or placed on any website as a regular web widget.
*Update: My laptop with the code for this project has died since I've created this project. That's okay since it wasn't a huge codebase, and newer versions of the APIs I was using have since been released. I wrote the initial gadget in a day, using the alpha ActionScript 3 eBay Library (not the newest beta release, as is on Google Code) and the Google Gadget API. See the screens of what I've done in a couple of hours, investigate the tools and the APIs and start coding!
Charles
As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been working on a joint project with eBay codenamed Project San Dimas. The entire development team consists of Alan Lewis from eBay, EffectiveUI for the front-end, and finally myself from Adobe.
My role in this project has jumped around a lot since the start, but for the most part, I was tasked with working on the middleware: I was responsible for allowing our application front-end to interact with the eBay servers. So, in the end, I ended up creating the very first ActionScript 3 eBay API. I'm excited about releasing this because I will be open-sourcing it. I am a strong promoter of the open-source community and I am eager to contribute.
Anyways, the project is hosted on Google Code and, although it mentions that it is released under the New BSD License, it is actually released under an Adobe Open Source License, terms of which can be found at the top of each source file (don't worry, it's actually a more open license than the New BSD License). Along with it, I have created a "Getting Started" document to help you get your feet wet. So try it out and if you like where it's going, e-mail me to become a contributor!
ActionScript 3 eBay Library (project, group, source, documentation, "Getting Started")
Charles
For a while now, I've been working on a rather quiet project here at Adobe. Coined "Project San Dimas", it was originally quite small, with the notion to build a simple Flash interface to eBay using Flex and the eBay APIs. I would work alone as a one-man-team, and after a bit of dev time, hopefully have a proof-of-concept that would allow people to browse eBay using a Flex interface. However, as I was developing the app, I started building tools, expanding the functionality, building up the interface, and before I knew it, people were on board to join the project. It has now grown from a simple Flex demo app to a large-scale project incorporating many teams to be shown at the Adobe MAX Conference in October 2006!
In a nutshell, Project San Dimas will act as a proof of concept for providing a rich user interface for a web service, in our case, eBay's web services, through their set of APIs and Adobe's rich-internet-application development technologies, Flex and Apollo. Currently, we have myself from Adobe working on the ActionScript 3 eBay API (which I will blog about soon), Alan Lewis from eBay helping out on the eBay API end, and a great team called EffectiveUI working on, you guessed it, the UI. The project has gained a lot of steam and is still constantly growing. This is a great example of where I am expecting the next generation of Internet applications are going.
In the meantime, I'm working on releasing my contribution to the project to the open-source community. Until then...
Charles
