I know it's been quiet here on the blog, but that's a good thing. Sifter is beginning to really pick up steam as we're marching towards the beta and launch. I'm spending my days (and nights) heads down fixing bugs and putting on the finishing touches. We're effectively feature complete, and it's all downhill from here.
The most significant accomplishment this month was getting all of the billing components and unit tests in place. We're using Active Merchant to integrate with the Braintree API, and while both are fairly powerful, Active Merchant is designed to create a consistent interface to different gateways. As a result, it doesn't fully support all of the features of the Braintree API. This isn't really a problem as reading through the Active Merchant source code actually turned out to be a great learning experience. However, in retrospect, I would probably give serious consideration to integrating directly with Braintree since it feels like we're only using a small piece of Active Merchant.
Tomorrow we'll be sending out invites to a handful of collaborators and officially start our alpha. We'll be spending several weeks looking for bugs and polishing the interface, making sure everything is humming along, and then we'll expand the invites to our beta testers. We'll be keeping the beta fairly limited, but if you're on the email list, don't be surprised if you see an invite in the next month or so as we might expand our beta a bit before the public launch.
We're getting close. I know it's been a longer wait than we ever anticipated, but rest assured it's drawing to a close. Personally, I really appreciate everyone's patience, and my top priority these days is to get Sifter in everyone's hands as soon as I possibly can.
We built a simple bug and issue tracker named Sifter and we blog about it when we're not working on it. We think it’s a great way to get feedback and keep everyone updated on our status.
Grab our feedWe'll only send emails for significant product announcements, and those happen every couple of months at most. Of course, we won't give away or sell your e-mail address either.
Comments
Great news! I hope I'll get picked for the alpha.
How is Braintree compared to Authorize, price wise? I'm really envious on the Rails community for having something like Active Merchant – we pythonistas don't have a good payment processing library, so we usually end up hacking together custom solutions.
Keep up the great work, hope to hear more soon!
Honestly, with all of the positive word of mouth for Braintree in the Rails community, I didn't even consider Authorize. Having tried to work with Authorize in the past, I was less than impressed, and Braintree's customer service and response times are awesome. The API documentation could use some improvement, but they were always ready with an answer to any questions the documentation didn't handle.
Kudos! And best of luck in the coming weeks.
Btw, having tried at least 7 or 8 ticket/issue management apps in the past year, I'd be more than happy to get involved at any point in the process and help with testing, feedback, etc. ;)
Glad to hear everything is looking good so far. Can't wait to see the finished product. :))
We're waiting for August Status Update :)