A very interesting email just arrived at the modules@perl.org mailing list.
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The following module was proposed for inclusion in the Module List:
modid: eBay::API
DSLIP: ampOd
description: Perl SDK for eBay's public web services
userid: EBAY (Jeff Nokes)
chapterid: 24 (Commercial_Software_Interfaces)
communities:
http://developer.ebay.com/,
https://ebay-perl-api-sdk.codebase.ebay.com/
similar:
Net::eBay, WWW::Ebay
rationale:
This is an eBay internal library now being released to the public.
It provides full access to the public facing web services provided
by eBay Inc. It is the form of an "SDK", where certain features such
as: auto-generation of classes and data-types; error/exception
framework; logging framework; sync and async API calls, compression,
retry capabilities, etc. There are similar (in concept) existing
modules mentioned above in this PAUSE form (Net::eBay, WWW::Ebay),
but neither is as extensive or feature rich as this. Plus, this SDK
was developed internally by developers who extensively deal with the
eBay API, and this library is in current use by eBay in a production
environment. Even though we have choses an alpha release, it has
been tested fairly extensively. Our hope is to have the Perl
community who use this module, help contribute to its success by
offering bugs, feature suggestions, patches, etc. via the bug
repository, discussion board and mailing list tools available at
http://developer.ebay.com or
https://ebay-perl-api-sdk.codebase.ebay.com.
enteredby: EBAY (Jeff Nokes)
enteredon: Sat Mar 31 00:11:14 2007 GMT
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I for one would like to thank Jeff and the gang at eBay for contributing an official interface to their systems to CPAN. It's something I wish I could say we get a lot of.
Unfortunately, most big companies seems particularly bad at releasing open source Perl code to CPAN.
I'm looking at you here Amazon and Google.
As for the quality of eBay::API itself, I've just had a quick first look over the (very comprehensive) docs so far.
The API style $oBject->methodName is pretty Java'y and not very Perlish, but frankly given the sheer depth of the implementation I'm quite happy to forgive them this oversight.
And I'm sure some sort of eBay::API::Simple is going to appear VERY quickly.
But do remember to play nice with the new kid, you shouldn't pick on him just because he's not from around here. And he has very rich parents we'd like to get on the P&C :)
