Four minutes introduction to OAuth

Minute 1 : What is OAuth ?

OAuth allows people to share their stuff (photos, videos, contact list) stored on one site(say,gmail) with another site(say,photobucket) without providing their credentials(gmail username and password to photobucket).

This data portability protocol also has support for desktop applications,mobile devices and set up boxes etc.

Minute 2 : How OAuth Works ?

Instead of giving your gmail credentials to photobucket,photobucket will take you to gmail login page where you will authenticate yourself and then allow photobucket to pick your contact lists.

Hueniverse has written a very simple and fast end user experience demo(click here) of Oauth that explains this cross authentication protocol.

Minute 3 : Why should I care as a developer ?

1. If you want your web 2.0 mashup to pull data from other apps while respecting security of your user’s accounts.

2. Now,your application can pull stuff from Google,Yahoo FireEagle,MySpace,Photobucket and many others.If these big boys are serious about this,why shouldn’t we look at it once?

3.Learning data portability protocol like OAuth is as important as building login page for your web 2.0 app.If you are working with OAuth as an employee,your promotion is round the corner.

Minute 4 : Give me the code

There are libraries available in your favourite language .C#,Java,Javascript,Perl,PHP,python … all libraries are hosted on Google Code.

Yes,there is a ruby gem for OAuth

Drupal has a module that implements OAuth.

click here for quick introduction of OAuth with Google.

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