Currently I was working on a simple Paypal payment system, which let our site user to buy credits via paypal and then redirected to our site again to confirm the deal. It was very simple and there was no problem at all when I was just trying with a single testing payment. However, the problem occurred when I tried to integrate it to our site —  After the redirection, all stored session values were gone! It is important that I need to use USER_ID, stored after a user logged in in a session variable, to confirm the payment.

Therefore, I have searched a bit on the internet and realized that this is not that un-common. If only customer ID is needed, a simple solution would be adding a input field called “custom” to the form that you send to paypal. And its values can be whatever you want, eg, customer id. I did so and it worked for me eventually…

The site I was working on will be open for public in a few days,  please check it (http://www.moosecatch.com) out and stay tunned with us if you like this idea!

Now most people who used internet a lot are quite familiar with different SNS sites such as Facebook, Kaixin, Twitter and etc… One of the similarities of those sites is that they boom like mushrooms( or virus…).  The way that they are spread is so smart that they do not need to put too much money on Ads, instead, every each their user is a living ad and will help let his/her friend join the site as well. This makes those site growing exponentially. Along with the growth of their users, new business ideas come in too.

As a web developer, me myself is fully aware of the unlimited potientials of SNS sites. But also as a normal user, I am quite glad to use those sites. Via Kaixin, I found several friends who I have lost contact with since long ago, which is sooo amazing! Frineds are sharing articles or videos on the site and that makes me easier to get news or interesitng information.

SNS sites are going to be a brand new business area and more and more companies will step into this area soon…

这个是我自制的阿贡~~ 喜欢地问我要哦~~

Recently I am working hard on my software engineering bachelor thesis together with my friend Josefine. The idea was initiated with a project called Moosecatch.  However, to be able to write an academical report, we got to figure out a proper topic for it.

“What about writing something about how to start a new business(Web service) at a low cost?” As Josefine suggested, we started with this topic. But soon, a concern popped up and we started to ask ourselves, is this really software engineering related? Those kinda of concerns had been going on back and force, and we have to confess that neither of us have much experiences nor interets in doing so “academical” researches. In this case, we prefer to be coding  geeks= =, at least I am speaking for myself…

With the discussion going on, eventually we finalized our thesis to benchmarking and comparing performances among different web services approaches, such as XML-RPC, SOAP and REST. Those buzz words gained a lot popularity recently and we would like to dig into them and by comparing their performances in various situations, a model will be generated at the end to help developers have deeper knowledge of when to use which.

At least, this is how we planned and right now we are working on implementing those three approaches ourselves. Soon testing will be started along with some interviews from other developers.

Perhaps its time to start a real blog of my own…

I was thinking of having one for a long time because I feel only having a stablished home page(www.xiaomingcai.com) without any activities going on is not that attractive. So, here comes Wordpress. The point of this blog is to publish my time-to-time thoughts and also some small libs that I coded or tried. Feedbacks are most welcome!