Using Commerce Toolkit for Applications, we integrated bank card processing services with our point-of-sale application in less than three weeks and with no prior payment integration experience," said MartinJaramillo, president of Buildernet Software. “The Toolkit also made bank card security requirements
easier to navigate."

As many of you are already aware, one of the main products that IP Commerce develops is the Commerce Toolkit for Applications.  This toolkit is designed to allow software companies to quickly create secure, commerce-enabled applications.  I’m pleased to announce that we have just released a new version of the toolkit.

The new release includes a slew of usability enhancements as well as a tutorial application.  These improvements are designed to continue to make commerce development simpler and more intuitive.  Using the toolkit, .NET developers are able to code to a single interface that provides multiple commerce services (Credit, Debit, ACH, Gift, Remote Deposit, etc.) and multiple service providers.  Consumption of this toolkit reduces time, cost, and complexity to bring commerce solutions to market. 

I’ve blogged in greater detail about this release here.

A few of the most interesting additions, and there are others enumerated at the blog above, are:

• The Addition of Transaction Builders – In this release, Transaction Builders have been introduced the assist in quickly building new transactions based on previous transactions. The Builders are simple factory objects that create new transactions based on existing data. This simplifies the process of creating linked transactions (such as creating a VOID from an existing AUTH) by automatically copying all the relevant data and values from the previous transaction object.
• Ease-of-Use – In previous versions of the Toolkit, granular-level methods were available that forced an application developer to string together these methods in a certain sequence to accomplish a given operation. New wrappers have been added that consolidate these methods into a single object.
• Addition of a Complete Transaction Container – An end-to-end Transaction Container has been added that allows an application developer to secure and store data quickly, and, in turn, easily un-secure the data for processing.

That link above is to the developer blog on "Commerce Lab."  This online resource, launched simultaneously with the toolkit, allows for developers to join a community of other developers building commerce software.  It is, in essence, a "one stop shop" for code samples, blogs by myself and the IP Commerce development and architecture team, FAQs, knowledge base, and initiating the certification process.  Again, it is all about reducing complexity (even though the toolkit is one of the easiest methods of building commerce applications).

If you are interested in the Commerce Toolkit for Applications, there a few resources to peruse:

• Commerce Toolkit for Applications Press Release
• Data Sheet for Toolkit
• Toolkit and Developer Tools Downloads

What’s your perspective? Agree? Disagree? Anything to add? Critiques?  The comment form is below. . .