Hueniverse

OAuth Presentation at Open Hack Day

I gave a quick introduction to OAuth recently at Yahoo!'s Open Hack Day. It is directly based on my Beginners' Guide to OAuth with slightly improved graphics. The PowerPoint file is available for download as well and contains additional comments and explanations in the notes over at SlideShare.

Discovery and HTTP

Discovery is the process in which machines find out information about web resources, which enables them to interact with previously unknown services. It centered around locating and retrieving the resource metadata and parsing it. The challenge is making this workflow consistent with the web architecture and the HTTP protocol, while at the same time addressing key scalability requirements and efficiencies.

Put simply: A server is trying to interact with an unfamiliar resource (identified by a URL). The server must first find out where the resource’s metadata resides, fetch it, parse the metadata, and learn how to interact with the resource. This definition of discovery makes clear distinction between the process used to find the metadata, and the format used to provide it. First find it, then parse it - and to find it, start from the resource's URL.