eBay announces an ActionScript SDK

At this morning's 360 Flex keynote, eBay announced that they have released an ActionScript SDK for eBay's Web Services that will make it easier for Flash and Flex developers to build applications that leverage eBay's web services. Alan Lewis has the full announcement over on the eBay Developer blog, so I got to chat with him about it today.

This comes out of work the team did with their "San Dimas" project, the Apollo application that has been demoed in a number of places and that I covered on this blog. They've essentially released a lot of the more difficult parts behind the application, and they really want to encourage developers to build things like the San Dimas application.

One thing that was interesting to me was that they modified Apache Axis, a project I wasn't familiar with, to auto-generate ActionScript. It saved them a lot of time, and I believe they are planning on releasing the changes so that other Flash developers can use their modified Axis version to help generate ActionScript code for their own projects.

I think this is a great thing for eBay to do. There are a lot of cool things that you can do with eBay's web services (Cooqy is one example) and this helps developers on the Flash Platform quickly jump in. I hope we see more things like San Dimas from the community. Alan was talking to me about some of the feedback they're getting about San Dimas and there are good ideas out there. This means more developers can turn those ideas into applications. And maybe even make some money in the process.

There is more coverage on the release by Tom and Renaun.