Google Wallet In-App Payments, https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/, developer documentation and tools are at the present best broken, incomplete, and/or lacking relevant information. I feel I must write this in the hope that they take note and perhaps hear our concerns and improve upon this. Also because there isn't much developer information out there right now about this new payment system, I hope this will generate positive activity.
The support documentation points to a very quiet forum at https://groups.google.com/group/in-app-payments/topics. Ideally, it could just point here where things are alive! ;)
Server side examples are documented only in part, directions suggest to use one of around five or six different libraries, but directions completely end there.
One library link leads to a GitHub stored library written in Python which, apparently, you must somehow rewrite one of the main files in order to use. Again this has not been documented by the Google Wallet team anywhere in the documentation. It's also very bizarre that they would choose to only write a small bit of a PHP tutorial, which, by the way, is a very popular, familiar, and ultra-highly-leveraged language. Instead, they wrote a main example in Python when the first example on the page, https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/tutorial, is written in Ruby...
The other surprising lack of quality about the docs is the page where they list the various error codes that one may come across while debugging. Its truly amazing that it's missing.
The errors may look something like this: Uh oh. There was a problem. We couldn't complete your purchase because of a technical issue. Details of the problem below: Unfortunately, we could not confirm your purchase with the merchant's server. Your order has been canceled. Please contact the merchant if this problem continues.
Additionally, nothing is written about these errors:
Uh oh. There was a problem.
We couldn't start your purchase because of a technical issue.
Details of the problem below:
Looks like there is an error in the setup for your purchase. Please
contact the merchant with this error message: Expected 3 components in
jwt: W29iamVjdCBPYmplY3Rd
None of them exhibit any professional expectations and/or definitive information to assist anyone.
Going another step further, the tools for producing JWT are broken:
http://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/jwtdecoder
The decoder decodes the JWT header as this:
{"alg":"HS256","typ":"JWT"}
https://checkout.google.com/customer/gadget/inapp/demo.html
The encoder only encodes the JWT header as this:
{"alg":"HS256"}
At least the docs have taught me one very useful thing, "The In-App Payments API uses a JSON Web Token—or JWT, pronounced like the English word jot." "jot?" Always good to know how to pronounce these things when you're down at the pub. I wouldn't want to make a fool of myself chatting up a girl with incorrect pronunciation like that!
