Friday, April 3, 2015

Developers: Making Your Life Easier

Integrating with another system can often be an "ugh!" moment in any developers life. Learning the way a new system works. Figuring out how to call a new API. Dealing with all sorts of weird edge cases. Scratching your head when what was working all of a sudden stops working.

Our API is Made to Make Developers' Lives Easier


We have worked with great APIs from other companies and really bad APIs from other companies, so we understand the pain when an API is anything other than great. Because of that we work hard to make sure our API is really great.

Easy to Understand Documentation


Our API documentation is straightforward, easy to read, and easy to understand. You can find the documentation here. We recommend you start by reading the "Sending Requests" article and looking at the "biller" class.

Helpful Tools


Our documentation has a "Try It" feature on every method's page. Try It gives you a web form you can fill out to specify the parameters for an API method. Clicking the "Generate XML Request" will open a new browser window with the exact XML request you specified ready to try. You don't need to guess how to format the request. Let us generate a request template for you that you can copy and paste into your own code.

Finally, you can click the "Execute Request" button to call the method live on our server. If a problem occurs processing your call our API returns sensible, informative error messages that make it easy to track down and resolve issues. You can manually edit the XML request on the Try It page and execute the call again to see what request works best for your use case.

XML Requests


All requests to our API are made using an easy to learn XML structure that you POST to our secure web server.

Response Formats


The API will return responses in XML format by default. You can also specify the following response formats if they are more convenient for your development purposes:
  • JSON - Receive responses in the JSON format for use in many development languages including JavaScript.
  • PHP - Receive responses in a format that you can pass to the PHP function unserialize() to retrieve a PHP array with the API response.

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