Spring Social brings Social Connectivity to Java

Posted by Alex Blewitt on Sep 09, 2011

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

SpringSource ,

Java ,

Languages ,

VMWare ,

Programming ,

Companies

Share |

RELATED Research

Today's release of SpringSocial 1.0 brings a standardised way to connect to social providers under a consistent API. The providers supported for the initial release include connectivity to Twitter, Facebook, GitHub and Trippit, and includes an SPI for other providers to be added.

The goal of SpringSocial is to provide programmatic access to social oriented sites (those that deal with a 'status' or have other ways of exchanging messages). It can also be used to provide a sign-in controller which allows the user to sign in with their Facebook/Twitter handle rather than having to have a dedicated authentication provider.

Since many of these sites use OAuth to provide authentication, the primary use case for SpringSocial is in a web-based application that can perform the web redirects necessary to authenticate a user in a web flow. For example, an on-line shopping application might allow a user to sign in with their Facebook credentials and provide a means to post offers to that site.

However, not all providers use the same variation of OAuth. There are three versions of OAuth in use; 1.0, 1.0a and 2.0 – and a variety of providers use different flavours. The SpringSocial core SPI has means for talking across these dialects, and each provider (Twitter, Facebook) has the definitions built-in to allow connectivity for that specific provider. (The 1.0 and 1.0a are almost identical, but the latter fixes a security bug which uses the OAuth key to sign the originating domain as well as the request, not just the URL.)

A variety of quick start documentation and samples are available. SpringSocial 1.0 requires Spring Core 3.0.5 or greater, although Spring Core 3.1 is recommended. It is available for immediate download, or can be added to a project by adding Maven dependencies.

RelatedVendorContent

Introducing SQLFire: a memory-optimized, high performance SQL database

RDBMS to NoSQL: Managing the Transition

App Server Evolution: REST, Cloud, and DevOps Support in Resin 4

Good Relationships: The Spring Data Neo4J Guide Book

Spring Data Neo4j Tutorial

Related Sponsor

VMware vFabric SQLFire - Test drive the data management system with memory speed, horizontal scalability and a familiar SQL interface

1. Back to top

   Facebook OAuth Integration APIs

   by Naresh Chintalcheru

   We used direct Facebook & Twitter APIs and did not like the tight coupling. Thanks to the Spring Social Integration framework.

   Reply