May monthly highlights

May has been a particularly busy month with a lot of news and development on the payments and developer fronts.  Let’s dive in!

I published the final part of my “Integrating Payments into WordPress” series this month, part3 on building your own PayPal WordPress plugin.  This series showed you how to install and use WordPress, add new capabilities with plugins, and build your own payments-related WP plugins using the PayPal APIs.  Click here to read the final part (you can click through to the previous articles from the top of this one too).

My DevZone blog posts from May included:

• I reminded readers of the original Android Developer Challenge deadline set for May 14th; subsequently PayPal extended the deadline to June 8th
• PayPal announced its purchase of FigCard, a very smartly done mobile wallet/checkout solution that requires no new hardware on the consumer’s side of things (this should make adoption much simpler if PayPal can find some traction with merchants)
• Apigee announced their new Source feature for their consoles (initially, for the Twitter console) which should make RESTful development even simpler and faster
• I wrote about O’Reilly Media’s free online Strata conference exploring Big Data
• PayPal updated their Android app to include mobile check capture capability
• Google launched their NFC-based mobile wallet solution, dubbed Google Wallet; PayPal responded with a lawsuit for trade secret violations
• I asked for reader input on a new series of articles I’m writing for the DevZone on comparing alternative payment systems to the PayPal X Platform; if you haven’t already, please give your input via this one question form

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including a summary of other key payments and developer related news from last month.