Basics of Building Applications with Square

The topics in this section describe general design concepts and patterns that are useful to understand as you develop on the Square Developer Platform:

  • Versioning in Square APIs - Describes the version-naming schemes used for the Square API and SDKs.

  • Access Tokens and Other Square Credentials - An overview of credentials used to identify or authenticate an application and authorize access to resources in a Square account.

  • Frontend and Backend Development - An overview of how Square APIs and SDKs are used in frontend and backend development.

  • General Development Concepts - Information about calling Square APIs and guidance for collecting and managing customer information and accommodating language preferences.

  • Common Data Types - Information about supported date formats and the common Address and Money data types used across Square APIs.

  • Common Square API Patterns - Information about programming patterns for idempotency, pagination, and optimistic concurrency that you should understand when using Square APIs. This topic also describes supported methods for clearing fields on objects.

  • Square API Lifecycle - An overview of the beta, general availability, deprecated, and retired stages in the Square API lifecycle.

  • International Development - Information about developing Square applications for sellers that are located in other countries.

Note

To develop on the Square Developer Platform, you need a Square account and an application. You can follow the Get Started guide to learn how to sign up for a Square account, create an application, make your first API calls in the Square Sandbox environment, and view logs of your API calls.