cfPayflowPro

What is Payflow Pro?
If you have been developing for a few years then you may remember that the Payflow Pro gateway was once owned by Verisign. This is the same gateway but in my opinion the product and support has improved in the hands of PayPal. Payflow Pro, a market-leading payment gateway, connects your online store to your existing Internet merchant account. It enables your business to:

* Accept credit cards, debit cards, more. Plus accept PayPal too (U.S.only).
* Optimize the customer experience by letting shoppers complete the checkout process without leaving your website.
* Stay secure with access to one of the most powerful risk-management systems.
* Integrate easily. Payflow Pro is pre-integrated into many shopping carts.

So now you know what it is and I bet your asking well how does it work? Glad you asked

1. Customers make purchases through your website, using your storefront.
2. Your storefront application passes the transaction data to the Payflow Pro gateway client.
3. The client sends the data to PayPal, and the Payflow processing cycle begins. We securely route your customer’s information through the network of processors and financial institutions.
4. Your customer’s bank authorizes or declines the transaction and notifies PayPal.
5. Upon approval, PayPal sends you a confirmation. The entire approval process usually takes less than three seconds.
6. You decide whether or not to settle the transaction. When you settle the transaction, your bank credits your merchant account.

Payflow Pro Online Payment Gateway
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_payflow-pro-overview-outside

The Problem
Now that we know a little bit more about the PayflowPro gateway I would like to explain why this project is needed. I have been using the Payflow (Verisign & Paypal) gateway for a couple of years now in my ColdFusion development and it has never been easy. In the past you had to install a CFX tag. Not sure what a cfx tag is?

* ColdFusion Extension (CFX) tags are custom tags that you write in Java or C++. Generally, you create a CFX tag to do something that is not possible in CFML. CFX tags also let you use existing Java or C++ code in your ColdFusion application.

While CFX tags offered a great extension to the ColdFusion language they had to be installed on the server. This made it very hard for those of us in a shared hosting environment. Ok so now we know a little bit about about the problem lets look at the solution

The Solution
The solution was the product of another great open source project. Mark Mandel (http://www.compoundtheory.com/) created JavaLoader and it is really the backbone of this project. The main purpose of this project is that it allows you to load external Java libraries at runtime. With that ability this project was born. cfPayflowPro will load the external Java libraries for the Payflow Pro gateway and allow you to use these libraries in ColdFusion. This project solves 2 big problems. It allows you to integrate PayflowPro without any hard installations and it in turns ads support for ColdFusion 8. I was reading on a forum post that people were having a hard time getting it to work on Scorpio.

You may access this project's Subversion repository with your client here: http://svn.riaforge.org/cfpayflowpro.

To view this repository with your browser, go here: http://cfpayflowpro.riaforge.org/index.cfm?event=page.svnbrowse.

You may download the latest set of files from Subversion as a zip file.

Anonymous users have read access to the repository while the administrator has write access.

This project is sharing its code via Subversion. Subversion is an open source source control method. You may find more information about Subversion here: http://subversion.tigris.org/