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Unless you are doing very simple ala carte purchases this button reduces total complexity by maybe 5%. If you are doing subscriptions, with coupons, with tria

Unless you are doing very simple ala carte purchases this button reduces total complexity by maybe 5%. If you are doing subscriptions, with coupons, with trial periods, creating users at the same time, wanting to show the user their coupon/trial status, last 4 of their CC, send emails on failed payments, cancel accounts on failed payments, let people update their card, etc, etc, etc it is still very complicated to get all that integration correct. What stripe needs to do is sponsor the development of an official rails gem that handles all these things like ActiveMerchant (plus views people can then hack on like normal rails views). Many people are implementing these things over and over again, probably including stripe developers themselves for their own side projects. It is a huge waste of effort and source of bugs for everyone. One nicely written gem that integrated easily with common practices for User models and people could integrate stripe with a simple "stripe_user :subscription, :email_notify" whatever. That would be awesome. I realize rails is not the entirety of their business but I'm just saying it would make me and a lot of other people happy.

hayksaakian 14y ago
It would be great. But the stripe gem out now is decent, and it's probably not high on their priority list.
dasil003 14y ago
It's not clear to me what you are envisioning here. ActiveMerchant is a payment gateway abstraction layer, and in fact it already supports Stripe. It has two use cases: A) legacy gateways with shitty APIs and libraries (eg. Authorize.net) and B) theoretical portability between gateways. At my company we recently swapped out AM for the Braintree gem because the lowest-common denominator made it inferior for interfacing against Braintree, and the payment interface surface area in the app is small enough anyway that the theoretical advantage if we switch payment providers is negligible anyway. Stripe if anything has a better API and ruby library than Braintree (Stripe uses a lot of Ruby internally is my understanding), so what's missing? A higher-level gem that gives you plugin payments would necessarily start making assumptions and compromises that would quickly whittle down the number of ideally-served use cases, whereas the Stripe API as it stands now is at the granularity to fit the maximum number of use cases without being over-complicated. If you want to make something easier I think you veer into clumsy high-level components that is more akin to Drupal than Rails.
- eagsalazar2 14y ago
  Sorry, what I described doesn't jibe with my comparison to ActiveMerchant as you pointed out. However it would still be badass to get a dropin solution for using Stripe in more complicated applications. And I know Stripe has a better API than alternatives but that doesn't mean it isn't still tricky. I'm not sure I agree that a higher level gem would be of limited use or only of use to a few applications. I think it can definitely be done in a way that would have helped me big time in all three applications I've integrated with Stripe despite their unique needs.

hayksaakian 14y ago

It would be great. But the stripe gem out now is decent, and it's probably not high on their priority list.

dasil003 14y ago

It's not clear to me what you are envisioning here. ActiveMerchant is a payment gateway abstraction layer, and in fact it already supports Stripe. It has two use cases: A) legacy gateways with shitty APIs and libraries (eg. Authorize.net) and B) theoretical portability between gateways. At my company we recently swapped out AM for the Braintree gem because the lowest-common denominator made it inferior for interfacing against Braintree, and the payment interface surface area in the app is small enough anyway that the theoretical advantage if we switch payment providers is negligible anyway. Stripe if anything has a better API and ruby library than Braintree (Stripe uses a lot of Ruby internally is my understanding), so what's missing? A higher-level gem that gives you plugin payments would necessarily start making assumptions and compromises that would quickly whittle down the number of ideally-served use cases, whereas the Stripe API as it stands now is at the granularity to fit the maximum number of use cases without being over-complicated. If you want to make something easier I think you veer into clumsy high-level components that is more akin to Drupal than Rails.

eagsalazar2 14y ago
Sorry, what I described doesn't jibe with my comparison to ActiveMerchant as you pointed out. However it would still be badass to get a dropin solution for using Stripe in more complicated applications. And I know Stripe has a better API than alternatives but that doesn't mean it isn't still tricky. I'm not sure I agree that a higher level gem would be of limited use or only of use to a few applications. I think it can definitely be done in a way that would have helped me big time in all three applications I've integrated with Stripe despite their unique needs.