Saturday, April 24, 2010

workshop day gids 2010 - 2 - paypal x

It went even better afterwards, Paypal has opened doors to their Payment methodology to developers. They call it PayPal X. They have published a complete SDK which allows developers to write independent programs that allow integration of paypal as a payment gateway in their e commerce applications.

Their idea is to popularize paypal and use its simplicity and capability in spreading its business reach. The whole team of PayPal was present at the workshop and the atmosphere was pretty nice. Khurram Khan started off by talking a bit on the background of financial transactions, further, Rangarajan took over and talked in detail.

Frankly, the session was interactive, because perhaps people are motivated by money, the chances of earning it, and the basic idea of linking real e-commerce to their websites by such low effort and simplicity. My personal interests in that area are purely out of curiosity, in the sense that I am more keen to know as to whats going on, then get down to the code details and start implementing it.

One thing that stood out for me is that paypal proposes to review the code of the developer before actually allowing to move it to production (live), but has no control thereafter. So, in essence, someone who intends to do something funny (read : wrong/illegal etc...) might pass the initial test by presenting a genuine case, and then once he;s live, he can go back and change the code. I feel that by allowing updations like this, paypal is losing a bit of control on its API usage by the people.

I would probably have built somekind of a dynamic filter or a pair matching kind of mechanism (or a checksum for that matter) which would change the moment the developer changes his code on production site. Every call to the paypal API should check this checksum/authentication token and should go through only if this checks also holds good. Well, its just a thought, and probably paypal has its own reasons not to enforce any such check, but, if I were Khurram, I would probably start like that, perhaps remove it later or something like that.

When I posed this to Khurram, he was saying that, the responsibility of doing anything illegal or wrong lies anyway with the developer or the site owner, so, paypal doenst really want to get in their way. They would be apprehanded sometime anyway, sooner or later. As much as I agree with his argument, I still think that paypal could probably play a role and possibly stop "wrong" things from happening to some extent, after all its happening through their infrastructure, although the ownership lies somewhere else.

Other than, this particular point, I think the SDK is pretty nice and ok. They allow Java, no special downloads etc required to start developing, besides the SDK of course, and that the API supports almost all kinds of operations.

I specially liked their idea of generalizing the paypal kind of services, where it comes to trust building. During one discussion a statement was said, I dont remember which one, but a paypal employee said that, "I am sure that when it comes to trusting someone over internet, you can trust paypal a lot more with your financial information than a relatively unknown website that you are using for the first time." That I agree with, and perhaps the Indian jinx of not using web for payments can be broken with a trusted guy on the net, paypal.

You trust one person, paypal, and the rest is handled by paypal. As far as this statement goes, there actually is a greater risk, what if paypal goes rogue ? It would then have all my information, all of it... well then you would have to trust someone.. right ?? or not ???

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