Java Store Beta: payment and a new client

Put an accountant, a lawyer, an MBA and a software engineer together into a room... Sounds like the lead-in to a bad joke, but it's the exercise that the Java Store team has been living through for the past several months. At the PayPal conference today Eric Klein did an announcement and demo of the next phase in the Java Store's development. We've been working with PayPal on this for some time, using their new PayPal X platform. It always amazes me how complex it is to deal with all the details of global finance. And even so, the store today only handles US issues. But the framework is in place to go global as fast as the lawyers and accountants can work through the details - but it'll take a while. There's a new client application for shopping in the store, and a new warehouse site for developers to upload products.

Even with the current US-only restriction, that's about 65 million desktops for a target market. Please check it out, kick the tires, let us know what you think: we'd like to get it out of beta and do a real large scale consumer launch as soon as we can.

November 3, 2009