Ma.gnolia Blog: OAuth Update: Discovery Support is Here

For our more technically-minded readers, we have an update on the progress being made with OAuth, and about OAuth support in Ma.gnolia.

Eran Hammer-Lahav announced yesterday the Draft 2 status of the OAuth Discovery spec, and the news that support had already gone live in FireEagle, Get Satisfaction and of course, Ma.gnolia.

What’s the big idea? Eran summarizes OAuth Discovery as

...where a resource protected by OAuth points to a machine readable document containing the configuration needed to access the resource. With that idea in mind, OAuth Discovery has been revised to fit into the general resource discovery flow, where the OAuth configuration is but one of potentially many other attributes associated with the resource.

This is a step in a longer vision:

As soon as we have a wide range of discoverable resources, we can make the case for built-in browser support for OAuth and discovery, enabling developers to implement a single protocol for all their access control needs, regardless if it is being used by an API developer or an end user visiting a site with a browser.

Posted by Todd on April 8, 2008 | Mark This Post

Member Comments

Colin on May 31, 2008

Thanks for making Ma.gnolia such a great and standards compliant social bookmarking site! One question - do you have any links to tutorials on how to have a desktop application correctly authenticate with OAuth without requiring the user to open their web browser?

Larry on June 2, 2008

OAuth was designed with the idea that a user would have some sort of access to a web browser, so doing so within the standard OAuth flow isn't possible.

However, I would have a look at how Flickr desktop applications handle this, as Flickr auth requires the same flow that OAuth does.