Improvements in WebCare
- Details
- Aangemaakt op zaterdag, 01 oktober 2011 14:49
- Geschreven door Sylvain
Those last weeks, huge work has been done on WebCare: bug fixes, new functionalities, performances improvement, etc. One of those enhancements was to extend the Twitter functionalities to other social media. Before this modification you were limited to Twitter only and could configure a Twitter feed in WebCare, meaning you could search on Twitter, get your timeline, your mentions or your private messages, or all together if you want!
The challenge was to rewrite the code to make a generic social media feed class that would fit for any social media that we implement today and will implement in a (close) future. Given that their API’s don’t allow the same functionalities (Twitter is limited to 144 characters, Facebook is not, and you can’t write a comment on a Tweet, but you can on Facebook, also you cannot send a private message on Facebook, but this is allowed on Twitter, etc.) and that the calls to the API’s are different: we use a .NET library dedicated to Facebook, we don’t with Twitter, those two use OAuth v.1 authentication, and the newcomer Google+ uses OAuth v.2; even getting the authorizations are different, Twitter gives you a code in exchange of an access token, Facebook and Google+ redirect you to a callback URL that you have to build to retrieve the access tokens. Well you get the idea of how tricky the implementation of such a generic class can be!
However we successfully managed and can now propose you to get your feeds from Twitter and Facebook, and more in the future!
I talked earlier in this post about the Google+ API; we did run some tests with it once it was released by Google to the public 15 days ago and is ready for use but unfortunately its functionalities are, yet, too limited to be integrated with WebCare.
We will integrate very soon other social media, but I won’t spoil the surprise J
