TCLink Credit Card Processing API

Overview

TCLink is a thin client API that allows a merchant to process credit card transactions through our processing gateway over a encrypted channel (SSL) using TCP/IP.

Features

A simple, cross-platform protocol
Encryption via SSL and trusted server certificate authentication
Good transaction times. Transaction duration under 1.2 seconds are common.
Fail-over to geographically distributed servers for extreme reliability
Available for numerous platforms and languages

Dependencies

TCLink uses OpenSSL for encrypted communications. Most modern UNIXes (include Linux and BSD) come with the libraries and headers. If you don't have OpenSSL already, you can download and compile the source. If you're using a Linux distribution which uses RPMs, OpenSSH provides these excellent packages.

Platforms

The following platforms have been tested as working.

Linux on x86/x86-64
Linux on Alpha (last tested on v3.3)
Linux on PPC (last tested on v3.3)
Linux on Sparc (last tested on v3.3)
FreeBSD on x86
OpenBSD on x86 (last tested on v3.3)
AIX on PPC (last tested on v3.3)
Solaris on Sparc (last tested on v3.3)
Mac OSX 10.4.X
Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows 2003

Usage

If you want to move real money around, you'll need a live merchant account. This release includes a test account to allow you to get a feel for the system. Contact TrustCommerce at sales@trustcommerce.com for details on getting a fully-functional account.

License

Most ports of TCLink are released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, aka the LGPL. See below exception for windows.

Download

The lastest public release of TCLink is 3.4.

Sometimes the archives have different minor version numbers, reflecting internal bugfixes or updates specific to that language. These versions are available under the LGPL.

These archives below may be under different licenses or are available in another location. Generally, questions about the APIs and the like should goto the respective developer(s).

Matthew Danish has also ported TCLink to Common Lisp. CL-TCLink is available here.

Debian users can get pre-built PHP, Perl, and Python versions of the above via apt.

Zope/Plone users can use an interface specially designed for them in conjunction with our TCLink Python package here.

Ruby on Rails users can use two interfaces designed for them in conjunction with our TCLink Ruby package. The first interface is a gateway level abstraction which can be found here. The second interface provides a simple to use subscription interface here.

Windows users can access the COM object and setup executable available for windows. The source for this isn't exactly in a very easy to build state and it requires the use of various proprietary tools as well. Support requests should goto the email address below.

Future Improvements

TCLink is a pretty robust API, having served its users extremely well. Of course, there's always something to be improved (alas, where does the time go) and so perhaps a wishlist might be in order:

A batch processing mode for TCLink. One would feed transactions into TCLink and perhaps some level of concurrent processing would happen.
An integrated reporting mechanism. Right now, users are directed to use our web reporting query interface and it would be nice if TCLink could do the same thing.
A good 100% .NET implementation running under the .NET Framework 2.0+ or Mono.

Contact

Questions, comments, suggestions, criticisms, code, etc. should be sent to here.

Thanks to Andrew Barnett of Data Clarity for the initial port to PHP.

Thanks to Brian Shirk for the initial port to Python.

Lastly, kudos to any developers for their work on making TCLink useful to others. If you want your name listed here, feel free to shoot us a mail and we will gladly acknowledge your specific efforts.