Lightweight SDK: Design Philosophy, Drivers and Constraints

A description on why a "bridge" into the main core SDKs were necessary.

In designing the architecture of the Xiippy SDK, a number of mindsets, drivers and constraints have been heavily used, as explained below.

• End-to-end encryption requires 2 ends, one being merchant’s POS or e-commerce server, the other being consumer’s personal device and involves extra configurations and key management processes. This requires the POS or e-commerce integration to implement extra UI, config management and key management procedures, turning the integration into a complex project. As a result, the entire config management, key management, and user interface have now been included into the Xiippy SDK Bridge, which runs as a service on POS and ecommerce servers and exposes locally-consumable simplified APIs that the lightweight SDK uses to interact with the Xiippy polatform. The following benefits are immediately achieved:

  • By abstracting the entire complexities of key, config and integration user interface implementation, the integration has now become a simple process

  • The XiippySDKBridge can now be updated on its own without imposing re-integration or maintenance work to POS or e-commerce developers, helping keeping the platform secure and roll out its updates at a much faster pace. For an innovative progressive platform like Xiippy, this is of high importance as the platform may go through rapid changes that have to be managed and rolled out with minimal impact on previous integrations.

  • The complex operations of the original Xiippy SDK around queue management, retrying the delivery of data and periodic sync are now all handled by the SDKBridge without exposing such actions to be done by POS or ecommerce servers developers.

  • The SDKBridge provides a unified data-rich interface for both in-person terminal and non-terminal-QR-based payments, as well as simple and QR-code based online payments, simplifying both scenarios. The selection of the mode is handled by the SDKBridge via its configuration API that is accessible only to those users with POS Admin rights.

  • Cryptography-heaviness of the core SDK and its complexity is a barrier for multi-stack support of the SDK. A lightweight simplified SDK has been built for mainstream stacks that can make the support and development a lot easier.