NInickjj·Feb 16, 2021
Thanks.
> Stripe, including webhooks support, actively developed
I've looked into Stripity Stripe. For some time it was unmaintained and ended up getting taken over by another maintainer. It's also not as comprehensive as the official Stripe libraries. There's also a very big difference in using an official Stripe library and hoping for the best with a random one someone developed. Just skimming the code base it looks like the Checkout module is missing features that exist in the official Stripe library in every other supported language.
According to the README file for Stripity Stripe it's also using Stripe's API version from 2019. There have been multiple major API updates since then, and there's been an open issue since November 2020 to add support for newer API versions with no replies. Personally I would be using one of those major f
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eatures too.
And this really is the point I'm trying to drive home. With Ruby, Python, Go, PHP, Node, Java and .NET these are problems you don't even need to think about. You just pick the payment provider's official SDK and start coding immediately, often times there's also an abundance of resources to implement the billing code itself into your app too through blog posts, official docs, YouTube videos, and even paid products like https://spark.laravel.com/. Stuff that makes integrating billing into your app (through Stripe, BrainTree and Paddle) being something you get done in 1 day instead of 3 months.
With Elixir it becomes weeks of comprehensive research, evaluating questionable libraries, opening PRs, and becoming a full time library developer just to get to the point where you could even maybe begin to start accepting payments with just Stripe. Then you have to repeat the whole process for PayPal, BrainTree and / or Paddle. These are all super popular payment providers.
> the best I've found is https://github.com/aviabird/gringotts
I asked the Gringotts developers if they would be supporting PayPal about 5 hours after they announced the project ~3 years ago. He said it was coming and to stay tuned. It's now ~3 years later and PayPal support isn't there. Neither is BrainTree or Paddle. Here's the open issue for PayPal support from 2018 (not by me, I asked on another site) https://github.com/aviabird/gringotts/issues/114. The Stripe integration is also missing a ton and hasn't been touched since 2018.
By the way, the Pay gem is really good. It's a smart abstraction and supports a ton of different subscription / 1 off payment use cases. Even complex ones like the type of app I was building.
> It's definitely a few weeks work to roll your own from scratch so to be honest I'd probably just integrate with Twilio and just pay for someone else to handle this for me.
Twilio ends up being 1 potential delivery method, it's not really someone you pay to solve the problem for you.
There's wanting to show notification in the app over websockets, saving them into a database, emailing them out only if they are unread, maybe sending a text through Twilio, Slack and other providers.
The noticed gem handles all of this for you (and supports Twilio too).
Notifications in general is another example where other frameworks have this solved in very good ways, but it becomes another example where you have to stop developing your app and start developing a notification library with Elixir.
At this point we've only talked about payments and notifications too. There's lots of other examples and these are all things to think about if your goal is to build an application.
Now don't get me wrong, it still takes a lot of custom code and effort to build an app with Rails but the time spent isn't on low level generic problems. It's letting you focus on your custom application's business logic.
And with less opinionated frameworks like Flask you can lean on Python being extremely well supported by almost every service that offers an SDK and also being able to find solutions to nearly every web dev problem online in some form or another (blog posts, youtube, stack overflow, etc.). That goes a long ways because at least you're not starting from scratch.