S-OT: PayPal fP Integration (was Re: FW: The FP Room: Meeting with Ken and Laura Brody)

[Fairlight]

Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Mike Schwartz-PC Support & Services done said:
> > How's PayPal integration strike you? :) That's on my plate right now.
> > 
> > mark->
> 
> 	Paypal acceptance sounds cool, but I don't have any customers in the
> on-line retail business.  Most of my customers are in the manufacturing,
> trucking and insurance areas.

I've heard that argument a few times in the last week.  There are those
that already have merchant accounts, or are in different business venues
that don't need such integration.  Can't do anything about the latter, but
on huge up-side is that your web server that would be online need not be
connected directly to your credit card terminals or modems for processing.
That helps even those with merchant accounts, as they don't have to worry
about that security phase of integration.

> 	It's nice to see that kind of thing available, though...

I think it will be, myself.  I'm building it for myself primarily--but if
it was for me with my limited -immediate- needs, I'd have been done with
my own solution a week ago.  :)  I'm building a full MySQL version that (I
hope) will also be compatible readily with PgSQL, MSSQL, and even Access
(*shudder*).  There just isn't anything out there that does the scope
of what I'm doing for -all- transaction types, all the way through data
population of -all- transactional data, including header/detail.

on the premise that hardly anyone is doing it because the solution isn't
there, I'm going to port it to fP as soon as I finish the SQL version (a
week, tops, at a guess--I'm going far faster than I'd have thought I could)
and it should be available in a few weeks, if I had to hazard a guess.  It
should be readily doable in fP.  I don't see any reason why not.  The same
six tables have to be built, and they have to track the same data.  Only
the code will be vastly different.  The external agent remains the same.

Once it's available, people may find it easier to take their stuff online,
especially if a major stumbling block has been, "Okay, how do I get paid
immediately and verify that fact?"

I'll be writing docs as well.  The documentation that PayPal provides is
decent, but it doesn't tell the -whole- story.  You have to do some fair
amount of testing and find the quirks in the system to know what you'll be
dealing with.  Since I've already -done- that testing, I may as well
document it so that the people that still have to integrate their business
rules (you can't genericize that!) into the solution know what they should
be looking for, and how to look at it.  But it'll all be as easy as doing
lookups when I'm done with it.

mark->
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