#spring social

Uno dei più popolari programmi della piattaforma DMAX è How It's Made(come è fatto). Per chi non l'avesse mai visto, si tratta di brevi strisce televisive in cui un voce fuori campo illustra i processi necessari per la realizzazione di un oggetto di uso comune, dalle gomme da disegno al bullone che tiene insieme la rubinetteria del lavabo. Oggi cercheremo di illustravi come è fatto Spidly!

Il punto centrale da cui partire è questo: Spidly usa esclusivamente software open source e il cuore dell'applicazione è il framework Spring. Attraverso la sinergia di diverse librerie di questo framework (Spring-Social, Spring-Security, Spring-Social-Facebook,ecc..) siamo riusciti a mettere su un sistema, esterno ai social network più diffusi, in grado di sostituire la mano dell'uomo nello scrivere aggiornamenti di stato, twitting, upload di foto, e chi più ne ha più ne metta, il tutto nella massima sicurezza per l'utente.

Entriamo ancor più nello specifico. Se siamo al nostro primo accesso, nella home page di Spidly ci sarà chiesto di loggarci al sistema con il nostro account facebook o twitter. A questo punto, dopo aver acconsentito all'applicazione di accedere ad alcune nostre informazioni, l'applicazione è già in grado di postare e/o twittare.

"Quindi voi potete avere accesso ai miei dati?" si starà chiedendo qualcuno di voi. Domanda lecita. Rispondiamo subito: "NI". Le uniche informazioni che possiamo "vedere" sono il vostro nome, cognome ed email. "E la mia password?". Le vostre password sono sempre al sicuro, infatti non sono loro che ci consentono di postare e/o twittare, in vero neanche viaggiano per voi, ma è il vostro access/token che ci permette di farlo. Questi viaggiano criptati attraverso la rete e sono ulteriormente criptati dal nostro sistema attraverso l'utilizzo del pacchetto Spring-Security-Crypto. 

Fidatevi, siete in ottime mani!

A questo punto il gioco è fatto. Abbiamo tecnicamente tutto il necessario. I vostri dati sono stati salvati nel nostro DB, il vostro browser ha memorizzato i cookie per gli accessi futuri.

Siete ora in contatto con la parte alta dello stack della nostra applicazione, quella che, rispettando la nomenclatura del design pattern MVC, viene chiamata View.

A prima vista è una semplice pagina web, in realtà essa è una ricca e intelligente interfaccia che vi guiderà passo passo alla compilazione dei dati necessari per attivare il motore del sistema, lo spider!

Una volta inseriti i tag che più vi si addicono e scelto il numero di news che volete far pubblicare, Spidly comincerà autonomamente a cercare le notizie più recenti che fanno per voi e all'orario stabilito dalla schedulazione automatica posterà e/o twitterà la notizia più attuale per i vostri interessi di ricerca. Ma non solo: sempre sfruttando i vostri interessi, sul vostro profilo saranno pubblicate anche foto potenzialmente "interessanti".

Nella vostra pagina personale è inoltre possibile, se avete effettuato la registrazione con facebook e collegato una pagina per la quale siete amministratori, valutare i grafici di rendimento del vostro pubblico. Questa funzionalità sfrutta il framework di Google Chart che elabora i dati del vostro profilo storicizzati nel nostro DB e vi mostra il livello di rendimento della vostra pagina.

TDC got crafty last night at the West Elm Boston's Spring Social what with the terrarium-building with blueGuava and bouquet designing with Foret Design. John LaRoche of blueGuava was kind enough to set aside time to show me, step-by-step, how to build a terrarium with succulent plants (basically the camels of the botanical world in terms of water requirement):

1. Gather your tools of the trade (note: you might not use all of them): a brush, chopstick (or wooden stick), a gardening shovel, and a glass vase or container

2. Add a thin base layer of rocks--these can be of any variety: pebbles from the beach, rocks from a store etc.

3. Add in substantial layer of soil (approximately 4 inches, depending on the height of the glass container).

4. Pot in your succulent plants by creating a little divot in the soil with your fist. Cover over the divot by patting down the soil around the plant.

5. In some cases, there are might be extra soil at the roots of the succulent; pinch it off gently if necessary.

6. Top off the layer of soil with a layer of decorative rocks. Rinse the rocks beforehand if they are dusty (for no particular reason other than aesthetic interests).

7. Brush off any extra dust around the rims of the glass vase

8. The final product: a terrarium world!

*John notes:

You can use any plant you like. Succulents are great because they are low-maintenance and beautiful in the glass container.

Capping the terrarium off with a wooden ball will help keep in moisture so you don't have to worry about watering your plant if you were to, say, go on vacation for a month

The terrarium is great to keep plants in because of the greenhouse effect it creates (plus, it serves as a great decorative item in an apartment, dorm, office, or home!)

Despite the recent departure of Eran Hammer, one of the lead authors and editors, from the OAuth 2.0 specification with what would seem to be a crippling end to the very popular protocol, the OAuth 2.0 Sky is in fact NOT falling. Hammer cites one of the main reasons for leaving the specification is the fact that the specification is "getting more complex, less interoperable, less useful, more incomplete, and most importantly, less secure." He states, "OAuth 2.0 at the hand of a developer with deep understanding of web security will likely result is a secure implementation. However, at the hands of most developers - as has been the experience from the past two years - 2.0 is likely to produce insecure implementations." This is an alarming statement considering most sites on the web use a form of OAuth to share resources. Despite this, Hammer states that the spec is not "dead", he just thinks it's bad. He shares some good points on the future of OAuth and what you need to know if you are implementing it. As of this article, the OAuth wikipedia page shows a list of service providers that actively use a form of the OAuth protocol.

So, regardless of where you think the specification is going, the reality is that so many service providers have already adopted OAuth as the de-facto standard for sharing private resources across the web, it doesn't look it will be going anywhere anytime soon.

Why Broadleaf uses Spring Social

If you have a Spring application and are looking to integrate with an OAuth provider, there's no reason not to use Spring Social. As Hammer's statement alludes to, implementing the OAuth "dance" is a non-trivial task. Because OAuth is still a moving specification, a lot of providers have their own implementations. Managing these connections across multiple providers yourself would be very hard and tedious. The good folks over at Spring know this and came up with the Spring Social framework. The framework makes it extremely easy to integrate with service providers that use OAuth such as Facebook and Twitter. One of the key benefits is the abstraction layer that it provides on top of the different authentication schemes. It currently handles both OAuth 1 and OAuth 2. Spring Social provides clear interfaces, so if you want to integrate with your own custom provider, there is an easy way to extend Spring Social Core to do so.

What does this mean to my eCommerce Site?

It's now pretty apparent that social media can play a huge part in developing a relationship between a customer and their merchant. The hard part is finding the right way to utilize social media to communicate your message clearly to your consumers. Twitter posted a case study that outlines how Zappos uses their service to generate over 1,200 conversations per month with its customers. Well the team at Broadlef realize that alot of merchants want the ability to utilize these services. We plan to make it easy for the framework to integrate with these services using Spring Social.

Why integrate Broadleaf with Facebook and Twitter?

Catering to your Customers

What if you had the ability to target specific content or promotions based on a tweet or attributes on your facebook profile? In a following post, I will discuss some ways to utilize the integrations with Facebook and Twitter to cater your content to your customers using Broadleaf.

In the meantime, let your customers sign in with their social networks

As of Broadleaf Commerce 2.1, the framework provides integrations points necessary to use Spring Social. Below, I will outline the steps necessary to add a "Sign in with Twitter" or "Sign in with Facebook" button to the Broadleaf Demo Site. If you don't have the Broadleaf Demo running, you can follow the Getting Started guide here

Step 1) Add the Spring Social dependencies to your root POM

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-facebook</artifactId> <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version> <type>jar</type> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-twitter</artifactId> <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version> <type>jar</type> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-web</artifactId> <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version> <type>jar</type> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency>

Make sure to add the dependencies to your Site POM as well

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-facebook</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-twitter</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-web</artifactId> </dependency>

Step 2) Create a new applicationContext-social.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.1.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd"> <bean id="connectionFactoryLocator" class="org.springframework.social.connect.support.ConnectionFactoryRegistry"> <property name="connectionFactories"> <list> <bean class="org.springframework.social.facebook.connect.FacebookConnectionFactory"> <constructor-arg value="${facebook.clientId}" /> <constructor-arg value="${facebook.clientSecret}" /> </bean> <bean class="org.springframework.social.twitter.connect.TwitterConnectionFactory"> <constructor-arg value="${twitter.consumerKey}" /> <constructor-arg value="${twitter.consumerSecret}" /> </bean> </list> </property> </bean> <bean id="usersConnectionRepository" class="org.springframework.social.connect.jdbc.JdbcUsersConnectionRepository"> <constructor-arg ref="webDS" /> <constructor-arg ref="connectionFactoryLocator" /> <constructor-arg ref="textEncryptor" /> <aop:scoped-proxy proxy-target-class="false" /> <property name="tablePrefix" value="BLC_"/> </bean> <bean id="connectionRepository" factory-method="createConnectionRepository" factory-bean="usersConnectionRepository" scope="request"> <constructor-arg value="#{session.customer.username}" /> <aop:scoped-proxy proxy-target-class="false" /> </bean> <!-- Configure this to use the Broadleaf Runtime Environment properties file --> <bean id="textEncryptor" class="org.springframework.security.crypto.encrypt.Encryptors" factory-method="noOpText" /> </beans>

Modify the current applicationContext-servlet.xml and add the following bean:

<bean class="org.springframework.social.connect.web.ProviderSignInController"> <property name="applicationUrl" value="${application.url}" /> <property name="signUpUrl" value="/register" /> <property name="signInUrl" value="/login" /> </bean>

Modify the current applicationContext-security.xml and add the following "https" intercept

<!-- Spring Social endpoints --> <sec:intercept-url pattern="/signin/**" requires-channel="https" />

Step 3) Modify your Broadleaf Runtime Properties files

For example, my development.properties file looks like:

#Spring Social facebook.clientId=my_client_id facebook.clientSecret=my_client_secret twitter.consumerKey=my_consumer_key twitter.consumerSecret=my_consumer_secret application.url=http://127.0.0.1:8080

Step 4) Add your new applicationContext-social.xml to web.xml

<context-param> <param-name>patchConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value> classpath:/bl-open-admin-contentClient-applicationContext.xml classpath:/bl-cms-contentClient-applicationContext.xml classpath:/applicationContext.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext-datasource.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext-email.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext-security.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext-social.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml </param-value> </context-param>

Step 5) Change your RegisterController to extend BroadleafSocialRegisterController

By default, it extends BroadleafRegisterController

@Controller @RequestMapping("/register") public class RegisterController extends BroadleafSocialRegisterController { ... }

Step 6) Finally, add the sign in buttons to your login page

Add the following html to login.html

<h4>OR</h4> <blc:form th:action="@{/signin/twitter}" method="POST"> <button type="submit"><img th:src="@{/img/social/sign-in-with-twitter-l-sm.png}"/></button> </blc:form> <br/> <blc:form th:action="@{/signin/facebook}" method="POST"> <button type="submit"><img th:src="@{/img/social/facebook_16.png}"/>   Sign in with Facebook</button> </blc:form>

Done!

NHS Spring Social was so much fun! :D But I can't believe I was that one lame kid who couldn't keep playing Capture the Flag because she felt dizzy and weak. -__- I used to play sports, damn it. Haha! I'm really out of shape. Need to start running. Besides, it was crazy hot outside. Oh well. I'm still feeling a little weak, but I've been drinking so much water and I'm feeling better! :D

Anyways, it was worth quitting the job. hah!

Now, getting ready for a night out with the lovely theatre officers at Downtown Dallas! We're having dinner at The Spaghetti Warehouse! :D Checking out the place for banquet and of course the menu! lol.

So many excting things happening in just one day!

I'm happy!