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Comment by aneth | Hacker News Reader

I experimented with play prior to 1.0 and loved it, but I went back to rails because I wanted access to more libraries.

Search stack overflow for java payment gateway library and you will find my as-yet unanswerred question. The java community seems much more intent on monetizing libraries and having annoying restrictions - in ruby shit is just out there.

I actually much prefer Scala as a language (although Play support was not ready then). Ruby is a dog in many ways and common practices in the ruby world are completely against my philosophy, but hey, it works and I know it.

I'd definitely recommend checking out Play and Scala.

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Can you be more specific about what Java libraries you're missing? Is it just the payment gateway? I think the following is his question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2242653/java-payment-gate...

That is my question. At the time there didn't seem to be any easy API for processing payments across multiple processors, e.g. Paypal and Google.

The question seems pretty specific:

I'm looking for a Java payment gateway library similar to the Rails active_merchant or the libraries available on many other platforms. I've been surprised that I've been unable to find one. I'd like something that supports the major gateways and providers, like Paypal, Google, Amazon, and some direct merchant account providers like Authorize.net.

Does such a thing exist in the open source world?

You can consider trying what we did:

Wrap Active Merchant in a lightweight web service which exposes a RESTful API that Java (or any language) can talk to.

Could try JRuby too.

This is how you can invoke jruby from inside Spring http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.4/reference/d...

Or you can use warbler to bundle your ruby app into a deployable WAR file: http://caldersphere.rubyforge.org/warbler/

If you do manage to get it working, it would be great to have a blog post on it.

Splintering an application into multiple stacks, languages, wrappers, etc. just to add pretty simple functionality from a library is not a good solution for a large number of reasons.

Using JRuby or a REST API to a Rails app is the kind of complication to an app you desperately want to avoid.

It may seem like "pretty simple functionality", but...

Active Merchant "raison d'être" was Shopify's requirements for a simple and unified API to access dozens of different payment gateways with very different internal APIs. Abstracting the APIs for dealing with credit cards and payment processors was core to Shopify's business, and they open-sourced what could have easily been kept closed. This abstraction is hard work, not the kind of work I want to do, and I'd rather use their robust library than roll my own or use another poorly-tested one.

We package and deploy Active Merchant in a single, stand-alone .jar file. We don't use Rails (Active Merchant works excellently as a stand-alone library). It's not as complicated as you think.

Yeah, or I could use a framework that includes this. I don't want to have to deploy multiple stacks just because of something like this. I was deterred from using Java at all figuring if a payment lib isn't available, it's not the only thing that's going to be missing.

Btw, I was a java developer for 6 years. I was looking forward to type checking, but the closed community was too much to handle after experiencing the ruby world.

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