Programming Social Applications

The OpenID OAuth Hybrid Extension

At this point, we have already discussed the value of implementing the OpenID authentication model to allow users to sign in using a variety of existing accounts, as well as the extensive amount of data and control that the OAuth standard gives you.

Now that we understand the individual specifications, we’ll look into combining them to enable us to take advantage of the best parts of each in a single implementation: hybrid auth.

With the OpenID OAuth hybrid extension, we can allow a relaying party to capture a user’s identity information using the OpenID implementation and then employ OAuth functionality so that the relaying party can request permission from the user to capture and set his privileged data on his behalf, giving us a much more comprehensive amount of social information from the implementation.

Next let’s take a look at the implementers of hybrid auth.