The AOL APIs: Open Auth

The release of AOL Open Authentication (OpenAuth) was announced during a presentation by AOL's Kevin Lawver and Gregory Cypes at the Web 2.0 Expo. Kevin applied the OpenAuth APIs in developing the Ficlets.com site. At the Expo, he said the implementation of OpenAuth in Ficlets took less than an hour!

Here's an overview of OpenAuth:

• What it is: an API that empowers web sites and applications to authenticate AOL/AIM users
• What it does: uses AOL's identity based Open Services to provide personalized services to AOL/AIM users
• The Goal: to be able to build web apps in less time without maintaining your own Identity Management Systems

What's this all mean? Well, it boils down to this: if you implement OpenAuth on your web site, you immediately have authentication for the entire 100 Million or so AOL/AIM users. Anyone who has an AIM screen name can log into your site, and their credentials will be authenticated by OpenAuth. This eliminates the need for you to install or invent your own user database and authentication service, letting you focus on developing your core offering.

Once again, AOL takes care of a very difficult task for you, what Amazon's Jeff Bezos calls the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" that typically occupies 70% of a young technology company's development resources. Wherever you can hand off the "muck" (another of Jeff's terms) to an already fully-scaled, proven infrastructure provider (like AOL or Amazon), it's highly to your advantage to do so, in my view.

Resources

The OpenAuth site (dev.aol.com/openauth) is the central point for information and documentation about OpenAuth. There you'll find discussions on how to get started, detailed API documentation, sample code, FAQs, and links to the OpenAuth forums and the OpenAuth blog.

The OpenAuth blog is authored by the OpenAuth team, especially Praveen Alavilli. Praveen also has posted blogs related to OpenAuth on the AOL Developer Network Blog, and he responds to questions posed in the OpenAuth Forums as well.

OpenAuth is a significant new product that demonstrates AOL's comprehension of the salient issues facing Web 2.0 developers and their user communities, and its commitment to providing dependable, scaled solutions that address those issues.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media