If you’re a web developer and happen to develop software for use in e-commerce, chances are, somewhere along the lines you’ll need or want to integrate with the big 4 shippers’ (UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL) APIs. You’ll find right off the bat that they all offer rather robust APIs, so your options are sufficient.
Then you’ll get to programming and realize that the documentation is pretty crappy, but specifically I want to address the idiosyncrasies of the USPS “test” environment. Effectively, what USPS means when they say “test” is not a test of robustness of your application, but simply whether or not your application can build a sample request (an EXACT sample request), and send it to their server. Yeah — it’s like asking a math teacher to write the numbers 1 to 30 on a sheet of paper (in order) before he/she can get hired.
The problem is, the USPS docs don’t tell you this, nor do they show you the sample request. So, for others who are about to embark on a few hour journey finding these details on Google (or worse, emailing USPS directly …eeek) I’m going to sum up a few facts here.
The most laborious for me so far is the one I already mentioned above. For a rate request, the docs show you a RateV3Request, but in testing you can only use a RateV2 request (which does not support package dimensions). Also, you must use the zip codes 10022 and 20008 for origination and zip, as well as 10 lbs. 5 oz. for the weight, and “LARGE” for the size. Everything else (LAUGH) you have leeway with.
If you don’t use these exact values, you’ll get responses like “Please enter a valid zip code for the sender” (which of course makes you think you wrote the XML incorrectly) or “The package size must be ‘Regular’, ‘Large’, or ‘Oversize.’” (even though you have “regular” quite clearly in the request.
The advice is to get to production as soon as possible, though why USPS would design things this way is beyond me, but them’s the cards, you gotta play ‘em.
I will add more here as I find them obstaclicious enough (yeah I just made up that word).
Amendment 1: I should add that the issues about the documentation not mentioning the “canned” requests is only applicable to the PDF documentation. It is stated quite clearly in the HTML versions. Go figure …
j/k — if you don’t understand, check google. I personally prefer HTML 1.0 strict, but use as you wish.
Day 1 of eBay DevCon 2009 plus a little tour of Northern California!
Corresponding pictures for this blog are available here: http://abv8.me/2Q.
My business partner Chris and I have made our 3rd voyage to eBay DevCon, this year in wonderful San Jose in northern California (where the girls are warm so I could hear my sweet baby say … ).
We flew in last night, Jet Blue flight 317 direct from Washington Dulles to Oakland International. Oddly enough, Chris’ neighbor Tooland happened to be the pilot, and he hooked us up with a free Heineken — yeah baby. Anyway, it was a very long 6 hour flight (it was only 6 hours 23 minutes in the air when I flew to Paris from Philly), and we had some rocky air with a little detour as there were t-storms and tornadoes in Kansas.
We touched down at around 9pm local time (12am EST) and headed over to Budget Rental where we picked up our awesome Kia compact POS.
Actually, it’s not too bad — good turning radius and small — hard for all the crazy California drivers to smash into. We got to the hotel at 10:30 or so and proceeded to pass out.
So here we are in beautiful San Jose. Well, cities are just cities, and, being the tree fanatic that I am, we had to visit the redwoods. We got up early this morning — 6:30 or so, and decided to make our way to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Now, for whatever reason, we put “shortest distance” into the GPS instead of “fastest time,” and we ended up on California route 35 — heading across the mountains on one of the steepest, windiest, but most scenic roads, I could have ever imagined. I got some awesome pics of northern California vegetation, and, finally, about 2 hours later, we got to the park.
Now let me tell you, the coastal redwoods surprised me. For all that they are huge, in the grand scheme of things, they really don’t seem all that large. Really, a 300ft tall tree is only as tall as a football is long. Gargantuan for a tree, yes, but in the grand scheme of things, they just feel like another tree — just ones that dwarf any big tree we have back east. That being said, they are so tall and straight, they are kind of modest. If a broad, bushy oak grew 300ft tall with a 200ft wide crown, I doubt I could relate to the perspective of such a tree being so modest.
From the park, we made our way to Santa Cruz so we could at least see the Pacific ocean. We spent a little time at Seabright beach http://abv8.me/2R, and ate at a nice little place on the wharf named Aldo’s. Apparently Guy Fieri ate there once. The burger was delicious, and we had a little European Starling join us for a bite. We named him Fred, and we were the best of buds.
From there, we headed back up route 17 to the eBay campus here in San Jose to listen to Madhu Gupta and company present the basic ins and outs of the new eBay selling manager pro applications platform.
General high points:
Now, we have already developed our first application for this platform. It is eZ labelZ for eBay, and it is a variation on our site ezbarcodez.com — geared to provide great integration with the already present eBay APIs so that sellers can print functional labels for their items.
Since we have been involved in the project since the alpha, most information was nothing new, but it was good to get a concrete overview.
Afterwards was “Happy Hour” with free beer and hors-d’oeuvres, and some networking. We had some great chats with some eBay personnel, especially the documentation team, and well, what can I say? Free beer.
So now we’re back at the hotel and I have hundreds of pics to parse through. Hopefully they will appear on Facebook tonight and I will link them here.
Posted in Commentary, Computers, Personal, Programming