It's been a crazy month! We moved out of our Sunnyvale home and moved into our new home in Los Gatos. See pictures below of the inside of our house when Mae-Ling threw her Angel party for her birthday. Alan launched PayPal APIs after a year of work, and it got some good press:
PayPal, The Fifth Credit Card?
Alan Tien, a senior API product manager at PayPal, said the new interfaces are a step up from their existing reporting system, Instant Payment Notification (IPN), and gives the merchant instant information about transactions taking place.
"In the past you could get an asynchronous notification, IPN, of the transaction details when they finished the transaction," he told internetnews.com.
"Now, what we've added on top of that is the ability to get a synchronous transaction ID upon completion of the payment, and then you can do an API call to get the rest of the information, [through] the GetTransactionDetails call."
Additionally, what PayPal Web Services brings to the table, Tien said, is, well, more public Web services.
"Sure, Web services has been the buzz around developers for the past two years and people have been talking about SOAP and WSDL and maybe even whispering about [Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (define)] for a long time, but how many public examples are there?" he said. "Google and Amazon.com have rolled out public Web services and ours is in that same vein, but our thinking is, 'hey, we're actually moving money instead of just getting information or making an order."
Check it out at https://developer.paypal.com.
