Demystifying Modern Social APIs Part 1: Social Sign-In

This article will give you insights into the inner workings of the proprietary JavaScript libraries that many of us include in our Web projects. Social sharing buttons and federated authentication, which are found in the likes of the Live Connect JavaScript API and Facebook JavaScript SDK, are just two examples you may have come across. In this article, you’ll learn about the OAuth 2.0 approach to user authentication, using XMLHttpRequest 2 for cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and also REST. At the end, I’ll demonstrate a working app that allows users to connect to and manipulate their SkyDrive photos in the browser.