hello.js – JavaScript API for OAuth2 authentication and RESTful services
A client-side JavaScript SDK for authenticating with OAuth2 (and OAuth1 with a oauth proxy) web services and querying their REST APIs. HelloJS standardizes paths and responses to common APIs like Google Data Services, Facebook Graph and Windows Live Connect.
“OAuth is a great idea for interaction between big sites with lots of users. But, as one of those users, it’s a pretty terrible way to get at your own data. That’s where foauth.org comes in.” Use HTTP Basic to access OAuth-protected data via a proxy-API.
Quite a while ago (like, in at least 2009), I started thinking about regaining control of all the content I was producing online. I was posting photos to Flickr, saving bookmarks to Delicious. I started Tweeting. I was checking in. All fun and games, and all of those services offer great tools for interacting with them (let’s face it, tools that are much better than WordPress’, because they are focussed on one thing). So I figured, why not write importers for these services and pull my content back over to my WordPress. And keep doing it periodically, so that I could keep using those tools. I want WordPress to be my “home on the web”, my digital hub, but I want to use these neat tools with their fancy apps and what-have-you.
Very quickly, I realized that if I was going to do anything useful on most web services, I’d need to be able to authenticate with them. No biggie, right? I know my username and password… Oh. Right. OAuth. Turns out that most web services use OAuth (or something similar) to authenticate, and it turns out that that’s actually a bit of a bear to implement, when all you want to do is write a simple little Twitter importer. And then again for a Foursquare importer. And a Flickr importer.
What I needed was a shared, generic authentication framework that would do all the heavy lifting for me. I would tell it I wanted a connection to specific service, and if it didn’t have one, it’d walk the user through the process of getting one. It’d give me a standardized format of authentication credentials and abstract out all the complexity of making authenticated requests against those services. Then it would make me a coffee*. What I needed, was Keyring.
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OAuth2 server implementation written in PHP.
Discovery of and access to identity information via OpenID + OAuth 2.0.
“A PHP library for OAuth consumers and servers. Complete with an extensible OAuth store, including a full working implementation of a MySQL store.”
“Information Cards are personal digital identities that people can use online.”
List of the ‘scope’ options available when requesting OAuth tokens for accessing Google APIs
Complete listing of Google services with APIs, linking to developer guides, client libraries and references where available.
Pretty slick tool from Google for tinkering with OAuth requests on their properties.
Cross-network friend finding service.
Best source for information on a lot of open web and identity technologies.
Cal Henderson’s super lightweight OAuth library, compatible with PHP4.
Conference exploring all the technologies relating to cloud-based computing, mash-ups etc. Looks at distributed APIs and data-sources and how to mash them all together.
For a project I’m working on, I’ve been looking at a lot of web service authentication/verification APIs lately. I thought folks might be interested in the results. Here are the methods available for a variety of web services/applications online, with links to their appropriate docs:
How to quickly integrate with Twitter’s OAuth API using PHP
Short tutorial with example code (PHP) on using Twitter’s OAuth API.
Chris Messina/Jyri Engestrom’s great manifesto of the people-centric/real-time web, based on portable identity and open standards.
My new, centralized OpenID and central identity hub, care of the badass Chi.mp
Implementers’ Draft: XRDS-Simple 1.0 Draft 1
“XRDS-Simple provides a format and workflow for the discovery of resources metadata, and other linked resources.”