PayPal APIs: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. Overview of Tweet Relevance

PayPal APIs are of no use to an application that doesn’t have revenue-generating potential, just as a technical book that’s filled with abstract examples and void of useful sample code is of little use to the reader. As such, it seems appropriate that a technical book on integrating PayPal APIs should be packed with examples and sample code that illustrate how to integrate PayPal products into a somewhat realistic application. Teaching a reader how to get “up and running” is a somewhat delicate balance: it requires getting into messy implementation details with a specific toolchain and a realistic reference application while avoiding unnecessary complexity that hinders learning.

Tweet Relevance, the sample application that’s referenced and built upon throughout this book, attempts to strike this balance. It’s implemented in Python (one of the easiest-to-read programming languages), runs on Google App Engine (a web application platform that is mature and extremely well documented), and munges data from Twitter (an accessible and extremely rich source of information). Given that the scope of the book is about getting up and running with PayPal APIs, each chapter must maximally focus on PayPal products; however, in the interest of providing you with some sample code that’s as useful and realistic as possible, Tweet Relevance provides a foundation that each chapter builds upon as a reference project.

The presumed problem that Tweet Relevance solves ...