A long day working on the shopping cart implementation on my website, well the PayPal payment integration, and I can sound the horns of victory and report that by this evening I managed to get it working and test purchased a CD from myself, which is the only way to be sure.
The PayPal API documentation is remarkably poor, it makes me (for once) thank Microsoft for its good quality Windows API documentation. So much in the PayPal gobbledegook seemed to be missing or contradictory. It looked like it had been updated here and there at random over the years. Another curse of any established API is that if can often split off (so-called branches) and have different options for different development environments, and different languages which pop up here any there. As an old-school programmer, my tools of choice are a text editor and my brain. Once you know one language, the others can be picked up in a few hours. The only ones I've studied were Pascal, Cobol, and dBase in college in the dark ages, but I'm self-taught in Dragon 32 BASIC (in childhood, which years later turned out to be useful because Microsoft invented it and it is still used today), Commodore 64 machine code (in childhood), Amiga assembler (teenhood), and C++ (adulthood) which I use for games.
Every step was slow today, line by line testing and crawling. One false move and everything vanishes in web programming. It's like typing a novel in a minefield. Taking a payment is also more complex than you might think, needing at least a list of items and prices and postage calculations, and taking and storing and emailing these details hither and whince (is that a word? It sounds like the perfect companion to hither!)
Well, the system is now live and for the first time in a long time I can sell art, books, and music online again; most notably music for the Music of Poetic Objects which is on CD now and isn't available from anywhere else.
Now I'm tired out and headachey. So much learned today. My strategy for any job like this is learn, do, test, then forget it. Tomorrow, the joys of art.
