Stripe is the popular Payment Gateway that allows websites’ owners to make money by accepting payments online. The Stripe API deals with the complicated stuff like Credit Card data, security and PII and offers an API that will allow you, the website owner/developer to deal with the easy stuff.
This easy stuff falls in four categories:
- Stuff you do one time during Stripe account setup:
- Setting up the Project (aka
Product). Typically this is one per website. - Setting up Payment
Plans- How often and how much will your customers pay you. - Setting up
Coupons- these are discounts/promotions that are set up per plan.
- Setting up the Project (aka
- Stuff that needs to happen with every user sign-up, or purchase:
- Creating a
Customer- happens when a user registers on your website. - Creating a
Subscription- ties a Customer to a Plan. - Creating a
Transaction- When a charge is made.
- Creating a
- Stuff that is done behind the scenes at a pre-configured cadence by Stripe:
- Prepare
Invoices - Prepare scheduled reports
- Prepare
- Events
- Provide notifications via callbacks when pre-defined events like
charge.succeeded,customer.createdetc occur.
- Provide notifications via callbacks when pre-defined events like
When integrating this rich Stripe API with your application, the first question that has to be answered is:
What data should be maintained in the data model of your app, and what data should be maintained in Stripe (in the cloud)?.
The answer to that of course is based on performance, audit and storage constraints. But if addressed purely on the basis of data redundancy,
the single link that ties the two models together is the Stripe customerId.
As we can see above, Stripe’s customerId is mapped to the app’s userId (which is the the Id of the User object in the Widget Spring Boot App).
Everything else can be retrieved and manipulated via the StripeService by supplying it the customerId.
Using the customerId, which would be typically mapped, one-to-one with the UserId, the StripeService
can be used to manipulate and access all other entities that are maintained in on Stripe.
In it’s current state (version 1.0.2), StripeService offers limited functionality. For those features not exposed via this service, the base
‘Stripe API` may be accessed. But most commonly used scenarios are described in the readme docs of the service here.
Based on the categories of features offered by Stripe (described above), StripeService offers features in category 2 for now.
The other categories represent one-time actions that can be carried out via the Stripe Dashboard.
If your app is built using Spring Boot, incorporating StripeService
is even easier via the accompanying Starter project.