Borland Joins eBay’s Web Services Platform

Delphi programmers can now tap into the eBay and PayPal commerce platforms to extend Web services applications, thanks to a joint distribution agreement signed by Borland .

Developers for the Borland product on the Microsoft .NET
framework can download a software
development kit from eBay and PayPal (which is owned by eBay), a development that gives enterprises and small businesses alike
another platform to sell their wares. With the APIs contained in the SDK,
Delphi developers can create an application tied to their own back-end
inventory database that runs on the eBay and PayPal platforms.

Officials made the announcement during Microsoft’s TechEd
conference in San Diego.

Borland said the eBay and PayPal Web services-based platforms provide new market opportunities for the many Borland developers working with Windows and Microsoft .NET.

For some time, eBay has been aggressively pushing for third-party developer involvement for applications built on Web services
standards. Officials at the popular auction site
announced in February that the company would support
the Simple Object Access Protocol in the Spring of 2004. The move opened up the eBay platform to corporate networks around the world, four
years after releasing their initial
set of APIs.

A critical XML component for delivering and sending Web services
information, SOAP inclusion resulted in Microsoft’s almost immediate vocal
support for the new eBay APIs. After eBay made the
announcement in February, Microsoft demonstrated eBay APIs running in Office products like Excel and FrontPage to create Web services-enabled auction sites.

Microsoft has been promoting eBay APIs since 2001, when it announced its support for the technology on its .NET framework.

eBay officials said they are pleased to add Delphi as another third-party
software architecture using its APIs. The software, which caters to
e-commerce and business application development, is used by many .NET
developers today.

Randy Chung, eBay’s vice president of platforms, said the eBay and PayPal SDKs will provide Delphi developers new opportunities to innovate on today’s Web services platforms.

Now that Borland is on board with eBay, it shouldn’t be too long before the
Scotts Valley, Calif., company rolls support into its other software
platforms, namely those using J2EE , a .NET competitor in the Web services industry.

eBay announced support for Java at the time of its SOAP announcement, so the technology is already in place. Borland, a platform-agnostic vendor, offers software tools that utilize both the .NET and J2EE frameworks.
The company also offers one that spans both, Janeva,
which allows Microsoft-based coders to integrate J2EE and the Common Object
Request Broker Architecture .