Interview Series: Evgeniy Tarassov about the Google Checkout API Python Library

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team

Next in our series of developer interviews is Evgeniy Tarassov, a Russian developer based in France that I met at Google Developer Day 2007 Paris in Paris.

Evgenyi works for a small company called TT-Solutions. For one of his contracting jobs he had to integrate Google Checkout in a Django application, so he wrote gchecky, a Python open source library for the Google Checkout API.

Evgeniy talks about the gchecky project, a Google Checkout API library in Python, what he likes about the API, the Google Checkout API Documentation, and what we could improve, a polling API for Notifications, Bruce Eckel is asking for a polling API too, testing tools (they're on their way, see Mendoza testing tool for the Google Checkout API), and launching Google Checkout in Russia.

The XML parsing and generation in Gchecky is quite compact through the clever use of Python metaclasses.

Thanks for the Python library and the interview Evgeniy, I feel fortunate to have met you in Paris.

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Specifying international shipping & taxes with the HTML API

Posted by Jason Costa, Google Checkout Team

Are you using the HTML API and interested in specifying shipping & taxes for locations worldwide? Our newest tutorial shows you how to translate elements from the XML API into HTML parameters so that you can specify shipping and taxes for any country where Google Checkout is available to buyers. This may be of particular interest if you're a merchant in the UK interested in using the HTML API to specify VAT and ship goods throughout Europe.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments on this article, please feel free to post them in the Google Checkout Developers Forum.

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Interview Series: Robin Kohli from E-Junkie

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team



Who would be best to initiate our series of developer interviews than Robin Kohli from E-Junkie? Robin is a star in the Google Checkout developer community: he's the top non-Google poster in the developer Forum, and his "fat free" shopping cart application is a great way to get started selling with Google Checkout in a matter of minutes.

Here's an example of what E-Junkie cart looks like from a user perspective, with a few items from the Google Store (this cart uses the Google Checkout sandbox so no real orders will be processed).

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Google Checkout API at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Google Checkout Team

Wednesday June 27th we will present
the Google Checkout API at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona. I will go over the API, the Google Checkout Java SDK, and the Mendoza testing server, and Thomas Steiner will present his work on code generation for REST APIs. Join us if you're in the area.

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Bookmarks for Checkout integration

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team

As the developer knowledge base and developer community for Google Checkout continue to grow, we're seeing a number of helpful resources and materials scattered across various places, which can make it difficult for you to find what you need. To help keep things organized, we've started to collect bookmarks for links to resources and materials of benefit to merchants in the process of integrating with Google Checkout. You can find it here.

We hope you find it useful, and if you know of any resources that may benefit other merchants, you're more than welcome to add any links to the page.

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A few words about the serial-number attribute

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team

Every synchronous and asynchronous message generated by Google Checkout includes an attribute called serial-number in the root element as shown here:

  <request-received
    xmlns="http://checkout.google.com/schema/2" 
    serial-number="58ea39d3-025b-4d52-a697-418f0be74bf9"/>

  <new-order-notification 
    xmlns="http://checkout.google.com/schema/2" 
    serial-number="841171949013218-00001-7">

Each message that you receive from us will have a unique serial-number (with the exception for duplicate notifications that we retry to send out in case of notification failures). Please bear in mind that although these serial numbers are unique, for every notification that you receive, they are not formatted consistently and can actually vary as in the examples above (i.e. "841171949013218-00001-7" vs "58ea39d3-025b-4d52-a697-418f0be74bf9").

The bottom line: you can trust that the ID number of a serial-number is unique, but don't make any assumptions or inferences about the format of the ID presented in the serial-number attribute.

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Shortening the notification retry period

Posted by: Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team

If you have implemented the Notification API to receive notifications via your API callback handler, we want to let you know that we have shortened the notification retry period from 30 days to 14 days. This means that Google Checkout will attempt to deliver the same notification message to your API callback URL until your system responds to the notification properly, or until 14 days have elapsed.

If you have any questions or concerns, please speak up in the Developers Forum.

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