Developing oAUTH service in OpenEdge WebSpeed

Question

I'm developing a new website which is going to include web API. What I want to know is how easy (or hard) is it to develop the server side oAUTH service into my new website?

I'm using OE11.0 WebSpeed in combination with Apache. Because I'be been doing Progress/OpenEdge 4GL/ABL development for over 10 years and nothing else I find very hard to translate existing code like, PHP, Python, Java etc.

I've read the RFC related to oAUTH and I find my self get lost in "key-varner".

Has anybody develop a oAUTH server side code in OpenEdge WebSpeed? If so, are you willing to share?

Answer 1

I think your best bet is to do this outside of Webspeed / ABL, otherwise you are stuck re-inventing the wheel. The easiest solution would be to call a .NET library directly from your ABL code but I think that the CLR bridge doesn't work for Webspeed / Appserver apps.

One solution is to have a separate, non-Webspeed app just to handle these oAUTH requests, using a ProxyPass directive on your Apache server to pattern match the URIs and route the requests to the appropriate app.

You could use any non-Webspeed tech. you want, but since I know Ruby best, I will point out the excellent omniauth gem, which supports arbitrary authentication strategies, including oAUTH. You can create a custom gem for your specific provider by working off of any of these strategies (see the "Notes" section and look at any of them that cite "OAuth API" or "OAuth 2 API").

If you want to go whole hog and write the entire app in a different language (yet still using an OpenEdge database), I will toot my own horn and point out the Ruby adapter for OpenEdge databases. This would allow you to use the Ruby on Rails framework for your Web app.

Answer 2

The CLR bridge works in OE 11 onwards now and we use .NET dll's in webspeed sucessfully.