I recently needed to setup recurring payments through PayPal’s express checkout for a subscription based site I have writen using Ruby on Rails. There is already an excellent framework for interacting with most payment gateways, including PayPal, for Ruby called Active Merchant. Unfortunately recurring payments support in Active Merchant for PayPal Express Checkout is limited to a script pasted into their lighthous bug tracking system. The trouble is that this script only covers creating subscription profiles and also later getting details of that profile, but I needed to be able to suspend and cancel subscriptions profiles as well as make changes to the subscription from my site.

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This may be an unusual first post in my Objective-C and Cocoa categories however it is quite relevant as the guys behind 280 Slides have released a new open source extension to the Javascript language known as Objective-J and a new Javascript framework based on Cocoa named Cappuccino.

Other than having a very nice logo designed by the guys at Sofa my first impressions are they have implemented Objective-C in javascript. To me this seems an unusual choice as I can’t image there are that many developers (within the web development industry) who are that familiar with Objective-C. Maybe I am wrong, certainly with the current gold rush to develop for the iPhone this will increase. I must admit I have been toying with Objective-C recently and once I got the hang of the syntax am really starting to enjoy it. So maybe there is method to their madness? Read more…