Correct API for accepting credit cards directly on my site using PayPal?

Question

We need to accept credit cards (from anywhere in the world) directly on our website. We'd like to use PayPal, but NOT require a PayPal account. The user should be able to simply type in the credit card, date and cvv directly on our site and go. I'm having a hard time figuring out what PayPal API I need to use for this, to integrate with our Java-based server. Turns out PayPal has an overwhelming number of APIs and documentation.

It looks like this link is what I'm looking for... sort of. But can I post this directly from JavaScript? It includes account name and password, which would be in the clear for anyone to see, so I'm thinking this must be server-side code. So the idea is to use a REST API to do this? So the client must pass the credit card information to my server, which then calls PayPal's server?

I'm a little lost, when looking at all the APIs at the Rest API page. Which ones exactly do I need to use?

There is also this link but I'm not familiar with "curl" -- looking for Java. Maybe the distinction is minor and easy to convert from one to the other?

Answer 1

Vern, if you look at the top of this page, you'll see Java (click Java) as one of the languages supported by the PayPal REST Payment API: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/api/

You will see related sample requests that use the Java SDK: https://github.com/paypal/rest-api-sdk-java