Salesforce Force.com Developer Meetup @ PayPal

Join Salesforce and PayPal for a developer meetup at the PayPal Headquarters in San Jose, California, on July 12, starting at 6:00 p.m. This event lets you learn and explore the Force.com platform and teaches you how to build e-commerce apps using the PayPal X toolkit for Force.com. Meet our evangelists and tech experts who will host code consultations as well as Force.com demos. For more information and to sign-up, visit http://bit.ly/SFmeetup.

New Versions of eBay SDKs for Java and .NET

New versions of the .NET SDK and the Java SDK, compatible with Trading API 673, are now available.

Both SDKs newly support ConditionID settings on AddItem and related calls. New console-type samples, helloWorld and consoleAddItem, are added to both SDKs with this release.

The Java SDK now supports Maven.

There is a new upload picture sample in the new .NET SDK.

See the readme files for the .NET and Java SDKs.

Remember to try out SDK upgrades in a test environment first.

675 Trading, Shopping, Merchant Data API Docs Now Available

Please remember to use a test environment when updating applications to use a new schema version.

To find out when a version of the API will be available, see the table at the top of the Release Notes for that API.

You can find the latest API documentation at the eBay Developer Documentation Center.

The second PayPal X Developer Challenge is now officially open!

We're excited to announce PayPal's second Dev Challenge! They're rewarding the most innovative payments applications that leverage the PayPal X platform. PayPal is also expanding the contest with new sponsors and more prizes: in addition to the $100,000 grand prize for the most innovative idea, and also offering $10,000 PayPal X category Awards. The X Awards, issued by PayPal and its partners, will be awarded to developers who create an app or service that directly impacts its users’ daily lives in a certain category. These include:

Best application that leverages PayPal X’s Mobile Payments Library;

Best application built by university students;

Best consumer application;

Best application that promotes cross-border commerce;

Best application that takes advantage of Yahoo!’s platform;

Best application that takes advantage of eBay’s platform.



In addition, we’re also introducing two community-based awards – the People’s Choice and the 2010 Innovate Awards. The People’s Choice winners will be selected by the PayPal X online community and the top finalists will be invited to exhibit at PayPal X Innovate 2010. The 2010 Innovate Award winner will be selected by attendees of the PayPal X Innovate 2010 [hyperlink to https://www.paypal-xinnovate.com/].

So if you’re a developer interested in working with PayPal's APIs and want to be rewarded for your great idea. A complete list of PayPal X APIs is also on x.com. More information is in the full press release [include link], and you can keep up with the contest by friending us on Facebook and joining the Twitter conversation at @PayPalX and #XContest.

And if you register for the Challenge by August 4 at 11:59pm PDT, you could win one of 10 iPads. All the contest timeline and deadline details are on x.com.

The big winners will be announced at PayPal X Innovate 2010 on October 26-27 at Moscone West in San Francisco!

Good Luck!

673 Trading and Shopping API Docs Now Available

Please remember to use a test environment when updating applications to use a new schema version.

To find out when a version of the API will be available, see the table at the top of the Release Notes for that API.

You can find the latest API documentation at the eBay Developer Documentation Center.

PayPal Innovate Call for Papers is Now Open!

We’re inviting developers to join PayPal's open Call for Papers for the Innovate 2010 conference. Here’s the chance to showcase your technical expertise, the innovative APIs you are involved in creating for the developer community, and the best-in-class approach you use to solve developer problems.

Interested? So here’s the deal. We are looking for session proposals from members of our own development and product teams. We have a track identified for eBay called eCommerce with eBay. Take a look at what we want and see if you can answer the call.

How do you get a session at the Innovate 2010 conference?

Submit your paper today - give us an abstract that tells us what you want to present. We’ll look it over and if we like it, you will be given the opportunity to present a session this October.

And remember! Entries must be received by our June 24th deadline.

My Favorite Photo from eBay DevCon 2010

Check out more eBay DevCon 2010 conference photos on Flickr:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebaydev/
• http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=ebaydc10&m=tags

Great Demo of the eBay Selling Team's New Listing APIs

In the Day 2 Bulk Editing and Relisting session, Scot Hamilton and Paul Henry from eBay's Seller Platform talked about new selling APIs they're working on.

They showed a demo of the new bulk editing tool on eBay, and they ran various live API requests to demonstrate how the new logic works and what you'll see in the API response.

Here are just a few of the useful features you'll get when these APIs roll out in 2011:

Context-Sensitive Dependencies and Metadata
You can submit a draft listing with a title, category, and other data you know. In the response, eBay returns details like the item condition options that the category supports. (No need to call GetCategoryFeatures ahead of time.)

Or suppose you decide to add Best Offer to a listing. You submit a modified draft, and eBay returns dependent fields (such as the best offer auto-accept price). So, again, you don't need to check in advance whether the category supports auto-accept. Later, if you remove Best Offer, eBay removes the dependent fields for you and tells you what changed.

Depending on your use case, you might never need to code field dependencies or cache site- or category-specific metadata yourself at all!

Fee Calculations
The new APIs are expected to offer the same real-time, detailed fee calculations that you see in eBay's bulk editing tool. If you make changes to a draft listing, the fees are recalculated as well.

View Item Preview URL
These APIs will offer a View Item preview URL in case the seller wants to see what an listing will look like on eBay before the listing goes live.

Bulk Changes Across a Set of Listings
In addition to supporting many listings in a single request, the APIs will enable you to apply homogeneous edits across a set of listings or templates. For example, you can say that field A should be X% higher than field B across all the specified listings.

You can also get the total fees across a set of listings.

Keep an eye on the Developers Program blog for more information about the new APIs in the future!

Hockey Sticks and Mastering your Destiny

Rolf Skyberg took us through one of the most entertaining presentations, titled Dangerous Curves: Hockey Sticks, Swine flu and More. It was about controlling the destiny of your company and products by mastering early detection of elusive patterns of growth and decline.

So what do Hockey Sticks have to do with mastering your destiny? It’s not about the Hockey Stick so much as about the shape. It’s one of the many patterns (seen over and over) that describe a company or product growth trend. This can be a very dry topic to all but a select group, but not the way Rolf presented it. Using humorous anecdotes and quirky real-life examples, Rolf described these 5 curves, what they mean, and how not to get bitten by them.

• Hockey Stick Curve
• Infection Curve
• Sinusoidal Curve
• The Gartner-Hype Curve
• Normal Growth Cycle

The presentation wrapped up with why it’s important to watch short term data points, but also to pay attention to the bigger picture - “It’s only a difference if it makes a difference”. And he illustrated this with a walk through possible options when you receive any of three “oh crap” emails in the middle of the night.

If you missed this presentation at eBay DevCon 2010, you can also find it on his blog. Rolf provides much more information, insights, and humor than I can do justice in one little blog, so please take a look for yourself.

Day 2 session: The Future of PayPal

There are so many different uses cases and payment methods coming!

PayPal X platform: the open global payments platform for developers.

The main offerings:

• Payment facilitation: pay anyone, receive from anyone
• Account management: identify users, permissions, accounts
• Information and reporting: Notifications, reporting, search

ADAPTIVE PAYMENTS API: the basic building blocks enabling payment

Pay (transfer funds), PaymentDetails; Preapproval (agreement signup); PreapprovalDetails, CancelPreapproval.

A sampling of use cases:

• send money (social networks, eBay, etc)
• split payments (distributing sender's single payment to several recipients, several countries)
• bill payments
• points and miles
• invoice payments
• scheduled payments
• money transfers
• mobile device payments

The easiest case: simply send money. There's a sender, there's a receiver.

Preapproved Payments:  In this realm, you via your app are authorized (preapproved) to make payment on behalf of the sender. Instead of the sender having to approve each transaction, you get the sender's approval ahead of time, per whatever details are appropriate for your business agreement (e.g. the sender approves, up front, "automatic transfer of $X from my account every other month"). You interact with the sender and with PayPal as the receiver, on behalf of the sender.

Parallel Payments:  You can pay multiple recipients at once. This enable partnership opportunities, marketplace payments, service fees, multi-merchant checkout, etc. And there transparency for the sender is that the sender ends up seeing ALL of the details of where the money actually went.

Chained payments:  In this scheme, there is a single initial recipient of the sender's money (oh, and the sender only sees payment to that single receiver). Then that single recipient passes the funds on to one or more recipients.

Combining:  You can combine chained payment and preapproved payment. But you cannot combine parallel payment and preapproval in the same transaction.

Here's a sample of the flow.  You have a created a rental application for use by property management to collect rents and then pay the owners of properties and the folks who do the garden maintenance at each place.

1. The sender interacts with the rental app, and the rental app interacts with PayPal.
2. Secondary receivers: owner of property and guy doing the gardening.
3. PayPal returns a transaction token (the "Pay Key").
4. The rental app redirects to the PayPal web site, and the sender approves payment. PayPal distributes the money per the rental app's instructions.
5. PayPal notifies both the rental app and the sender.

You can create Personal and Premier accounts. You can create Business accounts. Add funding sources. Verify accounts.

All this helps you streamline the user experience and increase conversion (folks don't drop off of the PayPal page just because they don't have a PayPal account). Supporting mechanism:  PayPal creates an inactive account to support the transaction.

SOAP, XML, NVP, JSON. Open source SDKs and toolkits. Mobile embedded payments library. And more!  Watch for it.

John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools