Upgrading to Spring 3.1

A few days ago I thought that it was about time to upgrade my sample code to Spring 3.1, after all it’s been around for a respectable amount of time and has a couple of bug fix releases.

Upgrading to Spring 3.1 is very simple of upgrading your Maven version number and rebuilding, something like this:

Getting Started with Spring Social - a Footnote

If you’ve seen my last blog, you’ll know that I’ve been talking about writing the smallest and simplest Spring Social application that I could think of that can read and display your user’s private Facebook data.

If, by any chance, you decide to use the Facebook Github sample as inspiration for your own application then you’ll need to register your application with Facebook or other Software as a Service (SaaS) provider.

Getting Started with Spring Social - Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog demonstrating what I thought was the simplest application you could write using Spring Social. This application read and displayed a Twitter user's public data and was written as an introduction to Spring Social and the social coding arena. However, getting your application to display your user’s public data is only half the story and most of the time you’ll need to display your user’s private data.

In this blog, I’m going to cover the scenario where you have a requirement to display a user’s Facebook or other Software as a Service (SaaS) provider data on one or two pages of your application. The idea here is to try to demonstrate the smallest and simplest thing you can to to add Spring Social to an application that requires your user to log in to Facebook or other SaaS provider.

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.