The advantages of using payment plug-ins are:
- Plug-ins enable you to take advantage of the advanced orders and event-driven payments functions in WebSphere Commerce.
- Payment plug-ins enable you to have a payment mechanism without having to use WebSphere Commerce Payments and payment cassettes.
- It is not necessary to use the traditional payment task commands (such as DoPayment and DoDeposit) and policy commands to perform transactions. The use of many of these commands is not supported with the advanced orders function.
- Plug-ins are horizontally scalable across your system.
- For those developers who need to integrate a payment system into WebSphere Commerce, payment plug-ins are easier to develop and test than payment cassettes, and should therefore be significantly less expensive to implement.
- If required, query logic can be easily implemented through query APIs.
- Plug-ins do not have to issue database commands to process or store data.
- As a J2EE component, a plug-in implements a component-oriented design rather than a task-oriented design.
- Commerce transactions are not blocked while waiting for the payment back-end system to respond.
If you are currently using WebSphere Commerce Payments and payment cassettes, consider these advantages and evaluate whether your payment processing would be better served through the use of payment plug-ins instead.