Preface

Whether you are relatively new to iOS app development or a seasoned expert, Apple Pay Essentials provides the skills that you need to easily incorporate Apple Pay into the payment workflows of your apps. This book shows you how to obtain the certificates that ensure payment information is securely transmitted between the user's iOS device, your payment gateway, and the banks involved in an Apple Pay transaction. The book teaches you how to provide a simple and consistent user experience, which expedites the time between desire and acquire. You learn how to respond to changes that the user makes to your preconfigured payment sheet, which is where the user confirms or modifies order and payment details. This book guides you through the interactions that your app makes with your payment gateway and your order-processing system. Finally, this book shows you how to design a simple order-processing web app that processes orders and payments submitted by client apps.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Apple Pay, describes how online payments work in general, and it introduces Apple Pay—a simpler and more secure online payment model. This chapter also shows you how to obtain the Apple Pay merchant certificates that ensure that only the appropriate entities have access to sensitive payment information.

Chapter 2, Payment Request Workflow, describes how to create a payment request, which is an object that stores information that is critical to payment processing (such as currency and payment network requirements) and details about the customer's order. It also shows you how to manage the main elements of the Apple Pay user experience: the Apple Pay button, and the payment sheet. This chapter also explains how to get inventory details from an order-processing web app, and how to present product information to the user.

Chapter 3, Payment Authorization Workflow, shows you how your app should respond to payment sheet events, such as shipping address change, and user authorization of the payment.

Chapter 4, Payment Processing Workflow, describes the actors and operations involved in processing a payment, including your order processing web app.

Chapter 5, Designing an Order Management Server, describes the main components of an order management server, including its data structure, and client API.

Chapter 6, Apple Pay API Summary, summarizes the API that is used for Apple Pay transactions.

What you need for this book

To follow along with the content presented in this book, which is based on the book's example code, you need the hardware and software needed for iOS development: a development Mac, an iOS device that supports Apple Pay, and a recent version of the Xcode developer tools. You need to be able to build apps on your Mac and run them on the iOS device, which requires a wired connection between the computer and the device (so that Xcode can install the app on the device). When running the example app on iOS Simulator, the example app connects to the order management web app running on the computer through a URI that targets the appropriate process. When running the app on the iOS device, however, the connection must be done wirelessly. Therefore, you need to configure your development Mac as a proxy server so that HTTP requests to the order management web app from the iOS device are resolved by the web app on the computer and do not go to the wider network. The documentation in the example code explains how to configure your development Mac as a proxy server using the SquidMan proxy-server software.

Who this book is for

This book is intended for people who want to learn how to incorporate Apple Pay into their iOS apps so that their customers can pay for goods and services quickly and securely. A moderate knowledge of the iOS API and the Xcode developer tools is required.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Enter the identifier string in the ID field—for example, merchant.com.company.merchantapp."

A block of code is set as follows:

PKContact contact= [PKContact new];
contact.phoneNumber= 
  [CNPhoneNumber phoneNumberWithStringValue: @"678-555-1234"];

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

- (void) paymentAuthorizationViewControllerDidFinish:
            (PKPaymentAuthorizationViewController*) controller
{
   [self dismissViewControllerAnimated:true completion:nil];
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Under iOS Apps, click on Identifiers."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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