Programming Amazon Web Services

Interacting with FPS

Production and Sandbox Environments

The purpose of FPS is to transfer money between different Amazon Payments account holders. This fact makes it more difficult to develop and test FPS applications than the other services we explore in this book because it involves dealing with real money.

To allow developers to create FPS applications without risking disastrous side-effects from bugs or misunderstandings, Amazon provides two distinct FPS environments: production and sandbox. You can interact with one environment or the other by using the appropriate environment endpoint URIs.

Production Environment

The production environment is the real deal. Transactions performed in this environment will transfer money between official Amazon Payments accounts, draw on credit card or bank accounts, incur transaction fees, and experience all the real-world delays inherent in dealing with external financial systems. To perform test transactions in this environment, you will need third-party customers, clients, or colleagues who are willing to help you out by transferring their money.

Amazon recommends that developers avoid running their application in the FPS production environment until it has been thoroughly tested and proven in the sandbox, and we are inclined to agree. The code and examples in this chapter will only use the sandbox environment.

Table 10-5 shows the URI endpoints to access the different components of the production environment.

Table 10-5. FPS production endpoints ...