Thanks for this - Amazon does indeed look good. At least, the notification architecture seems to be robust. I will drop Paypal for now and integrate Amazon.
I'm totally amazed at how janky payments infrastructure is. Frivolous sites like twitter have serviceable apis, why not the people taking my money? Jeff On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 7:06 AM, Joshua Smith <joshuaesm...@charter.net> wrote: > I don't have a ton of use experience with it yet, but so far Amazon Simple > Pay looks very good. As with the EC2 and S3 stuff, the API is clearly > designed by very, very smart people who really understand security and > distributed systems. > > Also, I'd bet that in a lot of demographics, already having an Amazon "1 > click" account set up is nearly universal. So that would seem to reduce > friction at checkout. > > -Joshua > > On Mar 18, 2011, at 4:49 AM, Jeff Schnitzer wrote: > >> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Jeff Schnitzer <j...@infohazard.org> wrote: >>> >>> Say what you will about Paypal's evil eye and their confusing product >>> line, at least the integration is going fairly smoothly. It feels >>> like 1990s technology but it works. The most helpful advice I can >>> offer: Forget everything else on their stupid overmarketed website >>> and go straight for "Web Payments Standard". >> >> I retract everything I said here. >> >> PayPal's API is a horrorshow. It makes the Facebook API look rational. >> >> I won't get into the fact that their documentation is confusing and >> grossly inadequate. The API is actually broken by design - I can't >> believe people use this stuff to handle money. >> >> IPN (the "reliable" messaging system) combines message verification >> with message acknowledgement. You can't verify a message without >> accepting it - which means you either a) commit a bunch of >> unauthenticated data and figure out how to roll it back on failure or >> b) accept the message and then HOPE that nothing goes wrong during >> processing. Paypal's sample code all suggests strategy b), which is >> just grossly negligent. >> >> I could rant at length about how defective the messaging system is too >> (what uniquely identifies a message? NOTHING!) but really this should >> go into a blog entry. I've built porn-serving infrastructure that was >> 100 times more robust. >> >> I am deeply, deeply disappointed. Even as abandonware, Google >> Checkout is better thought out. >> >> Jeff >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Google App Engine" group. >> To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google App Engine" group. > To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
