A very busy December and January

It’s been a very busy two months since my last monthly highlight post, so it’s about time to catch up.

For starters I published four articles, on four different technical topics, in the DevZone in the last couple of months.

First up was “Streamlining Purchases with Mobile Express Checkout” which discussed the new Mobile Express Checkout (MEC) technology, differences between MEC and other PayPal mobile techologies, and when to use the various options including MEC.  The article provided a refresher on plain old Express Checkout (EC) before diving into the details required to enable a mobile EC.  If you want to mobile-enable your customers, you need to know the material in this article.

My next article discussed using the Apigee PayPal API console to assist in your development of Adaptive Payments applications.  It provided an overview of what the console is and what you can do with it.  I’d suggest everyone working on PayPal programming and QA at least skim this article so that they know about the capabilities.  Also note that Apigee offers many consoles beyond just the PayPal one; this is discussed in a bit more detail in the article, too.

My third article during this period detailed “Developing and Deploying PayPal Apps“.  PayPal Apps are software gadgets served by PayPal to customers’ web browsers.  They enable you to provide access to your payment applications from an Apps tray on the PayPal.com site, potentially significantly increasing the visibility of and traffic to your application.  Apps are built upon a subset of the OpenSocial gadget framework which allows you (and PayPal) to leverage a lot of third party work and tools from the likes of Google and Apache.  One of the most refreshing things about Apps is that it is so incredibly simple to get started; with some ingenuity and a little bit of XML you can be up and running in very little time.  I highly recommend this article if you are looking for ways to grow your application’s exposure to more PayPal users.

My most recent article, “Divining DevZone Insight from Filtered Feeds and Deep Pages – Part 1, The Harvest“, is the first part of a two part series exploring tools and techniques to harvest and analyze data.  It focuses specifically upon DevZone content, but the principles and methods can certainly be generalized to other situations where you have RSS feeds and HTML pages full of data you’d like to analyze in an updatable, ongoing manner.  In this article I discuss the content of interest, outline my plan for conducting the harvest, and try a couple of tools out including Yahoo Pipes and YQL.  Watch for the second part of this series coming soon.

Click here to read the rest of the article on the PayPal X Developer Network including a look at recent blog posts and important related news from around the Web.