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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

I worked on and supported a pseudo-API at PayPal for 7 or 8 years..."Web Accept" and "IPN". 10s or 100s of thousands of integrations. 10s or 100s of millions of payments.

No versioning.

It works really well. Once you add versioning, it's too tempting to add breaking changes and just keep versioning. It becomes a total mess for everyone.

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I'm tempted to both agree with you and curse at you.

Yes, I agree with the idea of enforcing backward compatibility as much as possible and, when that fails, make it a social problem (documentation, email, advance notice...).

But being in the midst of one of those PayPal integration... oh my, what a mess!

* The sea of DEPRECATED in the documentation (hide it away?)

* The pervasive inconsistency in everything

* The choice of x-www-form-urlencoded for IPN data... (I'm trying to figure out some charset bug at the moment)

Anyway... :) No hard feelings!

PayPals API certainly isn't the worst but it's pretty awful. So much pain doing PayPal integrations. I assumed it just kind of happened but I'm shocked if you guys thought it was good... See Stripe for an example of not to abuse your API users.

Stripe is an example of how to be awesome overall.

It's not perfect but I'd like to point out that it was born in 2000 and still works fine today 13 years later. I think all the sample code I wrote is still in the PayPal docs somewhere.

The most painful PayPal integrations for me were the SOAP ones.

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