Orange is my favorite color

I have a need for an abstracted payment processing API and based on a thread on the CFGURU list, it’s obvious other people do too. A few weeks ago, I created a project called CFMERCHANT but found the name was taken so today it has been renamed to CFPAYMENT. You can see the project site at cfpayment.riaforge.org.

The goal is to let developers plug in payment processing without having to understand the intricacies of each gateway. Instead, we’ll provide a clean outward facing API for each payment gateway. Mark Mazelin has already been a great help in putting together some samples and documentation and we’re knocking ideas back and forth. We’ll be leveraging a lot of the thinking and work done by the ActiveMerchant project since they did a great job. Hopefully we’ll be collaborating with the cfCommerce team who is building an open source commerce platform for ColdFusion.

We should have support for five or six gateways in our first release which will be soon because both Mark and I need this in the short-term. If you have working code for a payment gateway, PLEASE contribute it. We’ll attribute it to you and you’ll be famous! If you’re interested in developing it yourself, even better! Please contact me and let me know. More to come…

9 Comments

  1. Mark Mazelin said:

    on November 13, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    Brian:

    Great announcement. Good to be working on this with you!

    Mark

  2. Ben Nadel said:

    on November 13, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    This looks to be a really exciting and hugely useful project. I cannot wait to see this in action!

  3. Peter Bell said:

    on November 13, 2007 at 3:34 pm

    I’m also really looking forward to this. Drop me a line if you get stuck with anything!

  4. Dan Vega said:

    on November 13, 2007 at 4:06 pm

    I have done tons of work with PayPal’s PayflowPro gateway. If you need any help with that please let me know. Also I have a project that is up at riaforge.

  5. Anuj Gakhar said:

    on November 14, 2007 at 5:09 am

    This is really cool. Do you have any news on which payment gateways will be supported initially? Google Checkout would be really useful to include along with a few other big players….

  6. Adrian J. Moreno said:

    on November 14, 2007 at 7:56 am

    We’ve got a CFC wrapper for cfx_cybercash and one for parts of the PaymenTech API. I can find out if we can contribute any of that code if you’re interested.

  7. brian said:

    on November 14, 2007 at 9:35 am

    Thanks everyone for the positive comments. I will post when we need help reviewing the API and other proposals to ensure we do things in a way that works for everyone.

    @Dan- Mark is going to work on Paypal very shortly. If he could email you to collaborate that would be great. If you have any code that would jump-start his efforts, even better!

    @Anuj- we are aiming for iTransact/PaymentClearing, Nova’s viaKlix, Braintree, Paypal and Skipjack as the core five because those are the ones we need in the short term. Adding onto those should be straightforward as we will solve regular processing, lockbock service and recurring billing.

    @Adrian- Please do send it – you can contact me at brian at vfive dot com.

    Look for a working cut of things within a few weeks for comments and review.

  8. tony petruzzi said:

    on November 30, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    right now I’m looking at the subversion repo on riaforge and I don’t see an abstract Payment.cfc. I know that the repo is raw code, but I’m wondering if you plan to provide an abstract we can extend? I have code written right now for Moneris, Authorize.net, and PlugNPay. I would love to contribute to this project.

  9. Steve Bryant said:

    on December 5, 2007 at 10:54 am

    This is very exciting!

    I have this on my to-do list for several months, so I would love to help if you need it.

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