Just a quick note to say that I’m proud to announce the release of some more open source code, as part of my collaboration with Van Patten Media.

The Van Patten Media Labs site has all the details of the Very Simple PayPal Bridge — a simple way to connect to the PayPal API.

Interacting with the PayPal NVP API is something that a lot of e-commerce websites need to do. If you’re writing your own code for a bespoke e-commerce solution, rather than shoehorning in generic ‘Shopping Cart’ software, there is quite a lot to think about in order to communicate successfully with the API and provide a great payment experience for the site’s customers.

The Very Simple PayPal Bridge is a PHP class that, as the name suggests, provides a very simple interface for the PayPal NVP API.

In any situation where you need to interface more directly with the PayPal API, the VSPB provides a clean interface for the other layers of your code, dealing with all of the implementation details of sending requests via cURL, encoding and decoding the arguments, as well as offering full support for graceful error handling with PHP exceptions. It is great as a lower-level component of a wider PHP e-commerce solution.

For more information, see the post on Van Patten Media Labs and check out the code at GitHub!