PayPal APIs: Up and Running

Chapter 5. PayPal Mobile Express Checkout

The latest wave of development focuses on creating applications and commerce interfaces for the mobile market. At the Innovate 2010 Developer Conference, PayPal announced the release of Mobile Express Checkout (MEC), which is built on the existing Express Checkout API. Mobile Express Checkout allows for fast development, especially if you already have an Express Checkout-based solution. In addition to Mobile Express Checkout, PayPal provides development libraries, or Mobile Payment Libraries (MPL), for both the iPhone and Android platforms. Table 5-1, also provided by Bill Day at https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-3035, outlines the standard PayPal APIs and their mobile equivalents.

Table 5-1. Standard PayPal APIs and mobile equivalents

PayPal APIs you use today	Use this for native mobile development	Use this for mobile web development
Express Checkout	MEC library for iOS	MEC
Adaptive Payments	MPL	N/A
Website Payments Standard	MPL	N/A

MPL is a native application development option, and it is especially useful if you are targeting apps on iOS- or Android-based devices that have no backend commerce infrastructure to interface with. MPL also supports some PayPal technologies currently not addressed by MEC, such as Adaptive Payments.

To fully utilize the capabilities of Mobile Express Checkout and the development libraries, you should be familiar with mobile website programming, the Name-Value Pair API, and additionally the platform you are developing on if integrating ...