GSoC 2011 Integration with External APIs: OAuth Roundtrip - Week 2

It's been two weeks since coding started, due to my heavy exams i haven't been working too much and had to skip first week's blog. I updated my timeline with target deliverables [0].

First thing to solve is how OAuth will be handled with a generic solution. As we wouldn't want to handle all jobs (e.g. token check, redirection, access token parsing) in every seperate view, there needs to be a generic handler (a 'token_required' decorator and a 'gdocs_service_object' middleware in Django's terminology) for views that needs to make GDocs api calls over OAuth.

I started to work on this diagram to discuss OAuth mechanism with community:

One of the particular problems when playing with gdata library was a not-self-defining error about unicodes. As GAE returns entity field values in unicode, a  method in built-in hmac library that expects 8-bit strings was crashing with this error message:
character mapping must return integer, None or unicode
Solution was simply encoding field value to utf-8: consumer_key.encode('utf-8'). I don't think same error would arise when using rsa instead of sha with authentication.

[0] -http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/GSoC2011IntegrationWithExternalAPIs#4._Project_Timeline