Full Stack JavaScript Strategies

Chapter 5. Third-Party Services

There will come a point in developing a product when you’ll need to use a third-party service. Third-party services offer complex or proprietary functionality that exists outside your codebase and your company. The third-party service is usually managed by another company; you pay a fee to use it and have access to support when things go wrong.

Third-party services come up when you need functionality that would take a significant amount of time to implement, would be difficult to maintain, and would likely need its own team, such as payment systems, authentication/authorization, and monitoring and logging for your app.

In this chapter, I’ll go over:

• Choosing third-party services

• Implementing a third-party service in your system

• Managing errors, outages, and upgrades

Working with third-party services is going to come up at some point, so it’s best to go in with an idea of what you’re getting into. Usually, the third-party service provides an API or software development kit (SDK) as an npm package that you install in your app, but you’ll need to provide some type of credentials to access the full functionality. There are also some SDKs that exist without a service just to give you specific functionality.

Keep in mind that there’s a chance that something on the service’s side could change and break without letting you know. It’s all interface code that you’ll be working with, so it won’t be any different in that regard.

We’ll be adding Stripe ...