PayPal Samples are virtually useless
I’m investigating the PayPal Adaptive Payments for a project, and was gladly surprised to find not only the sample app but also the SDK itself open sourced at GitHub. Cool!
My excitement ended abruptly as I opened the sample app. It’s so unbelievably bad you have to see it to believe it. A few WTFs:
- Sample is essentially a bunch of .aspx pages with plain forms that allow you to fill all possible parameters
- Form uses postback to a **1600+** lines of code .ashx handler that uses the submit **BUTTON TEXT** to determine the operation to perform
- Then the handler goes on to manually parse the HttpContext.Request.Params collection one by one and building the PayPal API classes used in the requests/services
How does web apps this way these days?? Being a C# sample, I would have expected at least to have an MVC app, that potentially used nice model binders to automatically parse form input and invoke PayPal from that, and fill an EF code first database with the IPN callback data, etc....