OAuth 2.0 is an authorization standard for accessing personal user information through web APIs. An authorization standard is an agreed upon set of rules by many major web companies that are responsible for authorizing who can access information, and what scope of information they can access. This authorization is granted in the form of a limited time access token (a unique identifier specific to the individual and the scope of information they can access). Due to this two-pronged approach of limiting both users and scopes, OAuth is the current standard for securing personal information. Web sites such as Google, Salesforce, Reddit, and Dropbox use OAuth 2.0.
Since OAuth secures your personal information, it can appear to be fairly complex. OAuth is even more complicated due to the variety of ways it is implemented, which are called grant types. We’ll walk through the different ways you can get an OAuth token in JSL. Please note that not all methods will work with all companies, so you’ll have to do a little research to find out which grant type to use. Usually, the company will have documentation of this either with their APIs or possibly in a separate OAuth section.
We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the OAuth protocol at the official website (https://oauth.net/2/).
Note: Only OAuth 2.0 is supported in JSL. OAuth 1.0 and 1.0a are still used by a handful of companies (such as Twitter) but are largely regarded as inferior to 2.0.