BOSTON--eBay is rebuilding its technical infrastructure in a project that could lead to the e-commerce giant hosting applications from outsiders.

An initiative, internally referred to as eBox, calls for the company to rebuild the technical guts of its eBay.com site as a series of modular services, rather than a single, unified application.

The idea is that internal engineers--and potentially outside developers--can use these services as building blocks to construct new applications, said Eric Billingsley, senior director of eBay Research Labs, which is behind the initiative.

Billingsley is scheduled to outline the project, which he refers to as an "open platform," on Tuesday afternoon at the eBay developers' conference here. In an interview with CNET News.com on Monday, he described the technology and the company's goals in undertaking the services-oriented architecture.

eBox aims to make it quicker to build applications by providing pre-built services that can be combined to create new applications without extensive coding. All of the functions on eBay, such as search and inventory management, will be accessible as services via application program interfaces (APIs).

This service-oriented architecture should make it easier for eBay engineers to roll out features, Billingsley said. Once in place, these services could also be offered to outsiders who build eBay applications, he said......


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