Recurring billing talk at Ruby Ireland

Thanks to everyone who showed up last night for the monthly Ruby Ireland user group meet-up at the Twisted Pepper. Unfortunately we completely forgot to try recording the presentation, but for those interested the slides are available here.

There did seem to be a genuine interest in this topic so I’ve offered to write a blog post (or perhaps a series of posts) explaining the implementation in more detail and with actual code snippets. To summarize what I spoke about;

I gave an overview on the basics of taking payments online, specifically;

• Banks
• Payment Gateways
• Libraries/code/web services available for your Rails app.

I explained each core method implemented in an ActiveMerchant billing gateway class, and I covered the important design decisions I took before building in recurring billing;

• High level decisions (which bank/gateway etc.)
• Pricing decisions (price plans, upgrade/downgrade paths/logic etc.)
• Actual implementation decisions (how its coded etc.)

Finally I talked about some pain points you’ll likely to come across when working with recurring billing and online payments in general. I hope everyone enjoyed the talk and I’d be happy to answer any further questions if you have them.

Ps. Apologies for the VGA cable problems, thanks to Declan’s trusty netbook we got there in the end!