Google Contributes Plugin to eBay Community Codebase

Google has open sourced the eBay Watcher plugin for Google Desktop and contributed it to the eBay Community Codebase, eBay's website where developers can collaborate on open source projects. The plugin was contributed under the Apache License, a commercial-friendly open source license. Google engineer Larry Gadea, who developed the plugin, is the owner of the Codebase project.

Now that the project is open sourced, I'm hopeful that other developers will contribute enhancements. One that I'd love to see is to extend the plugin to show not just the eBay watch list, but also the bidding, items one, and items lost lists as well. All of the code is in one javascript file, and it is easy to dig in and understand how it works. I reviewed early versions of the code, and I noticed lots of great stuff that would be helpful to other developers, including duration formatting, good key retrieval code, and a clever trick where by parsing the browser URL the plugin can tell when a new item has been added to the watch list so that it can automatically refresh. To build your own version of the plugin you'll need your own set of production developer keys, so sign up for the eBay Developers Program and then go through the certification process to get started.

Comments

[silVa]

this rocks