eBay Tech Blog

From the category archives:

Software Engineering

How We Built eBay’s First Node.js Application

May 17, 2013

For the most part, eBay runs on a Java-based tech stack. Our entire workflow centers around Java and the JVM. Considering the scale of traffic and the stability required by a site like ebay.com, using a proven technology was an obvious choice. But we have always been open to new technologies, and Node.js has been topping [...]

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Measuring Real User Experience with Site Speed Gauge

March 29, 2013

Many web performance testing service vendors, such as Keynote, offer last-mile testing data. In addition, many popular tools, such as WebPagetest, provide a convenient way to submit test cases so that you can collect large volumes of performance metrics. However, most of these services and tools are synthetic, meaning that they are not from real [...]

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RaptorJS – An End-to-End JavaScript Toolkit for Building Adaptive Modules and UI Components

March 15, 2013
RaptorJS

RaptorJS is an open-source toolkit for building JavaScript modules and UI components that function on the server and in the browser. RaptorJS promotes modularity, which is crucial to building reasonably complex HTML web applications that are maintainable, easily testable, and optimized. The central goal of RaptorJS is to enable applications to provide the best user [...]

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Fine-Tuning the eBay Technical Infrastructure: A New Methodology

March 5, 2013

I’ve been with eBay Inc. since 2009, and even just in the past four years, I’ve witnessed a significant change in the growth and importance of data centers, and the way we, as an industry, measure their efficiency. The Green Grid’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric – as well as the water and carbon equivalents [...]

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A picture is worth a thousand words

February 22, 2013

Complex ideas can be conveyed with just a single image. That’s the notion of the common expression, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” To provide rich user experiences, today’s web sites are incorporating lots of images. In most cases, these images are high resolution and have larger dimensions than in the recent past. Images [...]

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Early Detection of Frontend Single Points of Failure

January 22, 2013

Until fairly recently, a single point of failure (SPOF)—a condition that can bring down an entire system—has been predominantly associated with the backend world of server clusters, networking, and operations. However, with the increase in third-party widgets and the complexity of modern web applications, the web community is increasingly aware that a frontend SPOF can [...]

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Tomcat/Jasper Performance Tuning

January 4, 2013

JavaServerPages (JSP) is productivity-enhancing technology for building dynamic web pages. With more than 10 years of history, it is popular and mature. JSP 2.0 includes new features that make the code cleaner, such as the Expression Language (EL), the tag file, and simple tags. However, these new features can cause some performance issues. eBay uses [...]

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Bandwidth-based Experience

October 10, 2012

When designing new web pages or working on new features for an existing page, developers commonly consider the following factors: Page appearance for different layout sizes Browser-specific implementations Page behavior with and without JavaScript enabled All of the above points are valid, and developers should indeed think about them. However, there is another factor that [...]

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The Case Against Logic-less Templates

October 1, 2012

At a conference I recently attended, two separate topics related to templates sparked a debate off-stage about Logic vs No-logic View Templates. Folks were very passionate about the side they represented. Those discussions were the high point of the conference, since I learned much more from them than from the sessions that were presented. While [...]

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ql.io APIs for eBay Marketplaces

September 24, 2012

We are pleased to announce the release of eBay Marketplaces APIs based on ql.io: https://github.com/ql-io/ql.io-ebay-mp-apis We have created tables for most of the calls for the eBay Finding, Shopping, and Trading APIs. The fields required in the API calls are mapped using either EJS (Embedded JavaScript) or Mustache templates. You can use the tables as [...]

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