Ahh…. Finally!
I’ve de-mystified the use of OAuth authorization and authentication for integrating services like Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla into my mobile applications.
While I was playing around with MonoTouch and selected (like many, many others) to create a twitter client as a learning project. This is my first attempt to create anything connected to twitter so I thought it smart to not only learn the MonoTouch environment, but also try to learn as much as I can about the underlying technologies.
The first thing I had to dig into what the OAuth protocol and as a complete noob at this i started to surf around for documentation, there’s a lot “out there”. Spending a day reading I felt I knew enough of the theoretical ways of OAuth and was was eager to get started.
Being a bit pressed for time I figured that it’s better to find an open source library or application and dive headfirst into it and start debug that. Looking around for good code, came across TweetStation – an open source Twitter client for the iPhone written in C# using MonoTouch. NICE!
The application source and MonoDevelop solution is available at GitHub and provides in my opinion one of the best way to learn MonoTouch, OAuth and the Twitter API. It’s written by Miguel de Icaza (Wikipedia bio). No wonder it’s good :)
I’ve spent a couple of days with this source code now and have learned enough now to write my own standalone OAuth library that will work on iPhone through MonoTouch, on Windows Phone 7 devices and hopefully on Android devices through MonoDroid when it is released.
I’ll write a usage tutorial and provide a link to source code download as soon as it’s re-factored into presentable code.
Very Informative – Any progress on releasing the sample code behind this?