[bop-devel] Asynchronous response processing in BOP

[Will Hawes]

I'm going to be implementing online payment processing for our web site and have found Business::OnlinePayment on CPAN. There doesn't yet seem to have been much (any?) attempt to cater for asynchronous response processing, where the transaction response is sent to a merchant-specified URL independently of the web site flow (PayPal, protx VSPForm, etc). Obviously BOP was designed with synchronous processing in mind.

I've done a bit of thinking here and wonder if the simplest solution would be to have  a Business::OnlinePayment::FOO::receive() method to parse HTTP requests made by payment processor FOO and build the transaction response accordingly (ideally using a Business::OnlinePayment::Response object to keep things consistent). I like this approach because it doesn't introduce any extra complexity for the programmer - all that needs to be done at the success/fail URL is to create a BOP object and call receive(), from that point on it would all be the same as a synchronous request.

I hope the above makes sense. I'm afraid I don't know if it has already been discussed, or resolved in a different way (I joined the mailing list today), but would appreciate any thoughts. If it's deemed a good idea I'd be happy to do some work on new modules as part of my current project.