kdonald

2. Service Provider 'Connect' Framework

The spring-social-core module includes a Service Provider 'Connect' Framework for managing connections to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as Facebook and Twitter. This framework allows your application to establish connections between local user accounts and accounts those users have with external service providers. Once a connection is established, it can be be used to obtain a strongly-typed Java binding to the ServiceProvider's API, giving your application the ability to invoke the API on behalf of a user.

To illustrate, consider Facebook as an example ServiceProvider. Suppose your application, AcmeApp, allows users to share content with their Facebook friends. To support this, a connection needs to be established between a user's AcmeApp account and her Facebook account. Once established, a FacebookApi instance can be obtained and used to post content to the user's wall. Spring Social's 'Connect' framework provides a clean API for managing service prov