An Inside Look At eBay's Technology

endychavez writes with a CIO Insight profile giving a look inside eBay and its technology platform. The company has 40,000 outside developers working to increase its value and efficiency. From the article: "'They are way ahead of other companies' in terms of supporting developers, says one application builder... 'This a new wave of business,' says [another developer's marketing director]. 'eBay is a supplier, a marketing channel and a competitor. It's a weird arrangement.' ... 'If you can't split it, you can't scale it,' says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. 'We've made ourselves masters of virtualization.' ... eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks, adding 100,000 lines of code, all while in use."

Comments

My time at eBay as a seller wasn't like that

[saskboy]

Mr. Lister wasn't bad, but eBay's Turbo Lister is a blight on the history of application programming. While the site is generally well maintained, the support apps leave something to be desired, or they did anyway three years ago when I was still involved in using them. TL was the model of how NOT to design an application, in so many ways. Bloated file sizes, db corruption, copy/paste broken in the WYSIWYG editor. The list could go on and on.

And Ebay never used to tell customers when it expected to correct site programming errors.