Finally, the poor online merchants have an alternative to paypal in the UK!

Google checkout has been released in the UK and I am going to integrate it with oentries to start with.

There is an existing ruby gem for google checkout api integration.

Unfortunately at the moment it only does Level 1 integration when I need Level 2. Hopefully I can extend this and improve the general offering.

Also a short coming of google checkout seems to be that you cannot specify the API callback url on the fly. This means that the merchant actually has to configure their account to have this callback url. This doesnt fit very well with the model of oentries so hopefully there is a way round this. As it is possible to set the notify url in paypal on the fly.

Update: There is also the google4r (google for ruby) which has the beginnings of a Level 2 integration. I get the impression that there are some google employees working on this so the outlook is good.

Meanwhile I will soldier on with my own integration and I will let you know of any big issues that I come across in the near future.

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (NoMethodError)
undefined method `refresh' for #

Interestingly both Rails 1.2.1 and RubyGems 0.9.0 were released within days of each other. The essential RubyGems release was to fix a security vulnerability.

There are now warnings popping up all over the place in rails complaining about how require_gem is obsolete. Hopefully rails will be further updated to fall in line with this new release of RubyGems.

Warning: require_gem is obsolete.  Use gem instead.