I’m really impressed with every Amazon Web Service so far. S3 is clearly the industry standard for storage (I use it as a backup for all my Rails apps) and the Mechanical Turk is seriously underrated. It’s an amazing tool both for oursourcing and for co-op crowdsourcing.

So when I got an email announcing the Amazon Flexible Payment Service I thought it would be decent.

First off: somebody please write a library for this or integrate it into ActiveMerchant. I’m lazy and I don’t want to do it. If you do (and you tell me that you did) I will personally overnight mail you some fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. Anywhere in the world. I’ll also write a haiku about you. Seriously.

The description of Flexible Payment Service is pretty dense but here’s what I got:

• You can create a payment system of any level of complexity
• You can charge people micropayments but have them processed in bulk to save on fees
• It’s totally developer friendly so it’s capable of far more than the folks at Amazon have yet thought of.
• The logic portion of the service is called GateKeeper - powered by a GateKeeper (GL) language that’s totally extensible.
• Killer feature: You can charge people through their amazon account - or not!
• It’s got a sandbox that lets you build and test your app to play with the FPS without incurring any charges.

Amazon seems to get it. They’re taking the Unix tool making approach (many small tools that do one thing perfectly) and applying it to building web services.

Really, overnight cookies and a haiku for anybody who writes a library to let Ruby devs manage the Flexible Payment Service.

• Ben said: I was very excited to hear about this too. I'm definitely going to switch DK over once they come out of BETA. I'm also going try and hook up S3 for image/asset hosting, and I've even been toying with EC2 for app hosting. Good Stuff.
• Daniel Fischer said: Hey Danger, Long time no talk! (Since Railsconf). This looks really interesting, great timing as well; I was just looking at an alternative to payflow pro and authorize.net Thanks!
• Hasan Diwan said: Danger, I'm working on an FPS plugin and will add an entry when I'm done to my blog (url given above).
• Jack Danger said: Sweet! I can't wait to see what you come up with Hasan!

Jack Danger Canty
Ruby and Javascript developer @ Cloops Local Coupons

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