OAuth 2.0 Webapp Flow Overview

In my last few blogs I’ve been talking about accessing Software as a Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter using Spring Social. Some of you may have noticed that my sample code may have been a bit thin on the ground as I’ve being trying to describe what’s going on in the background and what Spring Social is doing for you.

So far I taken a bird’s eye view of OAuth defining it as the need for your application to get hold of an Access Token so that it can access your user’s private data from an SaaS provider without the need for your users to give your app their credentials. I’m concentrating on OAuth 2.0 and I’ve also hinted that before it can request an Access Token your app needs something called an Authorization Code, which it combines with its app secret.

This blog zooms in some more and hopefully explains what going on - at least in the case of OAuth 2.0.

The OAuth Administration Steps

In my last blog I summarised the point of OAuth as the need for your application to get hold of an Access Token so that it can access your user’s private data from a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider’s website such as Twitter or Facebook without the need for your users to give your application their credentials.

This blog takes a look at the setup steps necessary for this hypothetical application to become OAuth compliant and when I say “setup steps”, at this stage I’m merely talking about a boring administration step that you must complete, but don’t worry as there isn’t that much to it.

Facebook and Twitter: Behind the Scenes

In my last blog I created a simple Twitter application that uses the Spring Social Twitter module to access a user’s public time line data. As I said in that blog, the example isn’t particularly complicated and I’ll be adding extra features later. Before I do that I wanted to explain a little about what a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, such as Facebook and Twitter, is and show something of what the Spring Social API is doing for you.

Getting Started with Spring Social

Like me, you will not have failed to notice the current rush to ‘socialize’ applications, whether it’s adding a simple Facebook ‘Like’ button, a whole bunch of ‘share’ buttons or displaying timeline information. Everybody’s doing it including the Guys at Spring, and true to form they’ve come up with a rinky-dinky API called Spring Social that allows you to integrate your application with a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) feeds such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

This, and the following few blogs, takes a look at the whole social scene by demonstrating the use of Spring Social, and I’m going to start by getting very basic.