eBay DevCon 08 - Slides for Presentations

Unfortunately we did not receive a CD with all the presentations from the eBay Developer Conference 08 (eBay guys, here is a suggestion for ebaydevcon09) you can go to the Conference Sessions pages and download some pdfs of the presentations.

Not all of the presentations are there at the moment!

eBay DevCon 08 - Wed18 10:30 force.com & eBay - Building apps in the Cloud

This speak was presented by Dave Carrol, Principal Developer Evangelist, Salesforce.com.

By the way, there is a difference between force.com and salesforce.com. Force.com is the software platform which provides the services used by all the salesforces.com applications. Some of the services included in the force.com platform include, database, infrastructure, integration, logic, user interface and application exchange; all of those provided as a service.

Salesforce business is based on SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service, and offers a multitude of basic and advanced services that one can use to integrate and build your own application.

Their infrastructure scales horizontally in a so-called Pod Architecture, with mirrored database clusters and app servers in 3 data-centers in US. The database service offers 8,700,00+ customizations and 160,000 SQL statements per sec allowing the user to create tables, add fields, build relationship, automatic backups etc.

The Web Services SOAP API handles 1.75 billion API calls per month with a lifetime 28+ billion total API calls.

There is an Apex code which is a language that allow users to program a logic which is compiled and run in the server. The integration of this language has some specific database relation, like triggers for example, and is transactional. It is not a general language, but it has a Java-like instance, strongly typed, transactional, schema-aware and secured (no endless loops allowed). It is also possible a higher level of development based on declarative logic (point and click) and formula-based logic (similar to excel).

Dave finished his presentation by showing the development platform (based on Eclipse) and creating a simple application using the web interface provided by the salesforce platform.

Here is the link to the presentation.

eBay DevCon 08 - Wed18 09:30 eBay & PayPal Trust & Safety

This is a discussion panel having John Canfield (Senior Director, Trust &Safety Global Policy Management) as moderator and Liam Lynch (Senior Director, Marketplaces Chief security Strategist), Michael Barret (VP, Information Risk Management, PayPal chief Information Security Officer) and Amjad Hanif (Senior Director, Trust & Safety Product Management) as panelists.

Q: What suggestions would you give to PayPal developers to make their site safer? - The IT industry is not worried about security as it should, but the developers and customers are assured that PayPal do put a lot of effort on that, focusing on the basic issues (cross site scripting, sql injection and buffer overflow) is a big step forward. The PayPal and eBay teams rely on the community feedback to guide their development.

PayPal & eBay are more worried about the overall security of the users.

Member to member communication on eBay will be done anonymously to prevent emails from being harvasted. All communication will be done through eBay platform. Another option will be to have an email used only to member to member communication.

There were some complaints from users about their accounts being canceled on reports from other users related to fraud. The accounts are gone for a week, no matter how low is the percentage of violations reported on one account, specially for those dealing with brand products.

eBay DevCon 08 - Mon16 11:30, eBay/PayPal checkout

The 11:30 presentation I watched was given by Jon Jessup from Infopia.
It was called eBay/PayPal checkout and it was focusing on the experience the guys from Infopia had on integrating on-line payments to PayPal since 8 years of partnership.
He presented their impressions on using the Direct Payment and Express Checkout integration options. Basically Express Checkout is the most modern solution and the use of IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is the best option eBay offers now for integration.



Later on, he spoke about the Recurring Payments support PayPal is offering through their API and as a general comment he said that the most difficult in integrating with PayPal is the environment setup; once you are past this part, everything is smoother.
Since the beginning of this year, PayPal started charging its clientes for the AVS check, which forced most of Infopia clients to remove this option from their shop.

Lunch Time!!

Post comment: link to the presentation.