Emran Hasan's Blog

If you are like me, whenever you need to work with a 3rd party API or a gateway, you’d first search in Google for a possible wrapper for it in PHP. When it comes to supporting payment gateways, you get bunch of libraries in the search results who are fundamentally different. Some of them are old PHP 3/4 ones, some are new, some may need PEAR, etc.

As they were not required together in one single project, I used them whenever needed. But in one project, I needed them all. I thoughts it’s a chance and decided to stop using them and wrote my own ones where I can use the same methods for all the gateways.

So, here is an abstract PaymentGateway library which is being extended to be used for three popular payment gateways (Paypal, Authorize.net, and 2Checkout) in order to provide you with a similar way of using them. Note that the libraries are for basic usage only and do not contain options for recurring payments. Without much babble, let’s see a few examples of how you can use them.

Download

You can straight-away download the Payment library with all the libraries, examples, and readme.

Paypal

In order to process payments using Paypal, you’ll need to follow these steps:

1. Send the required information to Paypal (snippet 1). Be sure to specify your Paypal email where you want to receive the funds, the success and failure pages, the IPN page, and the product information. The example has the test mode ON, which you will not need in real scenario.

2. Create a payment success page where Paypal will send your customer after payment.

3. Create a payment failure page where Paypal will send your customer after failed payment.

4. Create a IPN page where Paypal will send payment notification in the background. Make sure you use/remove the test mode in conjunction with step 1. (snippet 2)

Snippet 1
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If you’re like me, you’d want to keep your ever busy life a bit organized. Being a techie, you’d first find a tool that will facilitate you in doing so. Most of us are fan of a number of such tools: RememberTheMilk, BackPack, Ta-Da List, 30boxes, Microsoft OneNote, Stickies etc. I’ve also tried all of them and a few others, stuck with them for a few days, but later lost the interest. This happened until one of colleagues, Anis, suggested me to have a look on Todoist.

At first sight, I thought it as “okay…another web 2.0 brainchild”. It seemed too simple to handle my complicated needs and I did not have high ambition with it. But as days passed, I was discovering new new features of it and gradually it became a part of my life. I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done (GTD) approach and Todoist became my dropbox for all the tasks in my mind.

If you ask me what’s so special about Todoist, I’d mention the following few features:

Simplicity

Todoist is damn simple and hosts one of the most powerful yet sleek web 2.0 interface on the web. It allows you to have an unlimited nested category/project list and under each of them, unlimited nested task list. This is something that most other tools miss. For me, it’s a super MUST feature.

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I still receive a good number of hits to my first (10 jQuery Essentials) and second (jQuery Essentials – Round 2) collection of jQuery plugins. So, I have been thinking about making the next post in the series for quite some time. Time has always been the killer of ideas, along with the fact that not too many plugins found way to my list of favorites.

Now that I have some fresh essentials, this post was inevitable.

18. jQuery UI

This is the official big boss with a number of core interactions (drag, dropping, sorting, selecting, resizing) and few great widgets (accordions, date pickers, dialogs, sliders, tabs) built on top of those. Although its a great collection, I somehow haven’t been able to use it in any real projects yet. It seems small plugins always get a favor than big collections

19. Facebox

This is a cute, little plugin that shows Facebook style dialog boxes using jQuery. It supports nearly all the possible contents you might want to show in a dialog box: image, div, remote pages. It has both automatic behavior and manual invoking. Simple and fun to me.

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AJAX has become the core component of many web applications around us. And its fairly easy to handle AJAX now a days, with the help of various javascript libraries (ex: jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, YUI, etc). But there is one security issue that web browsers impose in doing AJAX calls – they don’t let you do AJAX calls in web servers different than yours. That means, if your script is in www.mydomain.com and you’re trying to do AJAX call to www.anotherdomain.com/get.php, then the browser will through error like: “Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open”.

Now, there are a number of solutions to this problem. Instead of explaining them all to you, lemme provide you the simplest one: using a PHP transport file. If you already know the thing and just need the script, download from here.

Others, let’s see an example implementation first.

Example use

   1: xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=function()

   2: {

   3:     if(xmlHttp.readyState==4)

   4:     {

   5:         alert(xmlHttp.responseText);

   6:     }

   7: }

   8:  

   9: xmlHttp.open("GET", 'http://myserver.com/transport.php?action=' + 

  10:                     urlencode('different-server.com/return_call.php') +

  11:                     '&method=get&data1=101&data2=pass', true );

  12:  

  13: xmlHttp.send(null);

Now, lets see how it works:

1. The script makes an AJAX call to the myserver.com/transport.php with a few parameters:
   • action = the target URL you need to fetch, from a different domain
   • method = the HTTP method (post/get)
   • data1, data2 = sample parameters for using as either query-string or POST fields
2. When the request is received by transport.php, it uses cURL to make a call to the page mentioned in action.
3. Based on the method, it either makes a GET request or a POST request. In both cases, it sends the extra parameters that are sent.
4. After the response is received, transport.php echoes it. So, you have what you need!

Download

transport.php Cross-Domain AJAX call transporter. Downloaded: times

Comments and suggestions are most welcomed