Help with Django app and payment systems (general queries)

Question

Hi guys,

So I'm working on an app in Django, however this is my first time venturing into advance integration for a webapp with payment systems (I used to work with paypal/2checkout so it was pretty no-skill-required).

My partners have chosen PaymentExpress, and there are several sets of API (all of which are pretty new to me) and they are as follows (http://www.paymentexpress.com/products/ecommerce/merchant_hosted.html)

1) PXPost 2) Software toolkit 3) Web Service

I would like to pick the brains of the many experts in this area, on what these various APIs are useful for and their disadvantages.

Of course, if there is a ready Django Pluggable/Snipplet that works with one of the above APIs above, I am open to exploring them too.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

PXPost is the most straight-forward solution. You just communicate via HTTP POSTs and XML. You don't need any external dependencies, just urllib2 and ElementTree.

Software toolkit can be used only on Windows platform, so it's not an option for you(or is it?). COM is also a nasty beast.

Web service is a more elegant PXPost. You won't need to build your own XML request, the SOAP protocol does that for you. It just downloads the WSDL where it's specified which methods web service exposes and generates Python module with web service's methods. You just then import the module and off you go. The problem is that it's not always easy to generate that Python module. If web service uses some custom data types it can get quite complicated. Check this for more.

So, I'd try with web service approach first, if that fails go with PXPost.