Integration with “Social” services using Spring-Social

Not so long ago, the SpringSource project piggy bank was replenished with another project - Spring-Social , which is designed to simplify the creation of applications integrated with various social networks. This project was not lit up on Habr in any way, I will try to fill this gap.

So, what Spring-Social promises:
* A set of templates for working with various “social” services - as long as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & TripIt;
* Request Factory which signs service requests (in a special way for OAuth);
* Automatic “retrieving” of the “Facebook Id” parameter for its subsequent transfer to the SpringMVC controller.

All this, according to the authors, will allow creating applications on SpringMVC more easily and quickly with integration (for example) with Facebook or LinkedIn.

If you want to run now and create one, hoping that now everything is done with one click, I hurry to disappoint you:
')

Oauth

At the heart of all "integration" is the OAuth protocol. To start working with any service, you need to pass authorization. The process is a few steps and not very simple. A sample description of the process can be seen in the following picture:

So, the OAuth authorization process goes beyond the framework of Spring-Social, that is, you will have to write it yourself or using available tools.

Supported Services

The set of supported services is not yet large (although it probably includes the main Facebook & Twitter in the west) - it probably won't come in contact soon :)
As well as the set of API functions supported in their template-ah is minimal - only very basic and very basic functions. The truth for working with other functions will be your Request Factory.

Total

In the current version and with the current set of functionality, the project somehow clearly does not pull on the “top-level” project Spring Community.
But in fact, the project version 1.0.0.M1, in essence, is a torn out “reusable” part of another SpringSource project: GreenHouse , and it would be naive to expect stars from the sky. I would like to wish the developers good luck and further development of the project, so that, as a result, the creation of “social” applications on SpringMVC would become easy on one-two-three.

Additional Information

If you still decide not to wait for the final release where everything will be "in chocolate" and try to use Spring-Social right now here are some links that may be useful (all in English):
* The project itself ;
* Announcement of the project with code examples ;
* A very simple example of using Spring-Social (much easier than GreenHouse, the source of which is recommended to “smoke” by the authors of the project;