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.

Use the Wall

When I was young The Wall was either an album by Pink Floyd...

Defining a Class’s Responsibility - Naming Part 4

Previously, I discussed CRC cards and revealed a big secret in that the crucial thing about a CRC card is that it forces you to explicitly think about and write down your class’s responsibility, and that being able to define a class’s intent in this way is crucial to creating a viable name. I strongly believe that well defined responsibility and a good name equals good software and so, this blog contains a few guidelines that may be helpful.