Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Overview of this book

OAuth 2.0 is a powerful authentication and authorization framework that has been adopted as a standard in the technical community. Proper use of this protocol will enable your application to interact with the world's most popular service providers, allowing you to leverage their world-class technologies in your own application. Want to log your user in to your application with their Facebook account? Want to display an interactive Google Map in your application? How about posting an update to your user's LinkedIn feed? This is all achievable through the power of OAuth. With a focus on practicality and security, this book takes a detailed and hands-on approach to explaining the protocol, highlighting important pieces of information along the way. At the beginning, you will learn what OAuth is, how it works at a high level, and the steps involved in creating an application. After obtaining an overview of OAuth, you will move on to the second part of the book where you will learn the need for and importance of registering your application and types of supported workflows. You will discover more about the access token, how you can use it with your application, and how to refresh it after expiration. By the end of the book, you will know how to make your application architecture robust. You will explore the security considerations and effective methods to debug your applications using appropriate tools. You will also have a look at special considerations to integrate with OAuth service providers via native mobile applications. In addition, you will also come across support resources for OAuth and credentials grant.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering OAuth 2.0
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
11
Tooling and Troubleshooting
Index

Creating the world's most interesting infographic


We've now concluded our exploration of the various methods for passing our access token in an API call. We did this by demonstrating API calls to two of Facebook's APIs: one to fetch the profile data of the user, and the other to fetch the feed data of the user. You can now use this data in your application to generate all sorts of interesting statistics about your users. We will leave this as an exercise for you.

You can see an example of what can be accomplished with this data. Simply visit the following website:

www.worldsmostinterestinginfographic.com

This website is a production version of the server-side example that we've built in this book. Let this be a very simple example of what can be accomplished in a short amount of time using the OAuth 2.0 protocol to interface with a world-class service provider like Facebook!

Tip

See it on GitHub!

The full implementation for this entire web application is available for viewing on our public...