Posts Tagged ‘google’
Salesforce & LinkedIn Developer API: 401 – Unauthorized
Image via CrunchBase
I’m not going to get into the boilerplate code you’ll need in order to get OAuth up and running as it’s pretty straight forward, but I did run into a peculiar issue which took me some time to narrow down. To reproduce these steps you’ll need to:
- Correctly setup OAuth between the Force.com Platform and LinkedIn
- Authorise access to your LinkedIn account
- Attempt to fetch a resource using an API endpoint such as: http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/network/updates?scope=self
When attempting to make the call out in step 3 you’ll get a “401 – Unauthorized” error. So to be clear OAuth is working perfectly but a call like this one will still result in the error.
After some troubleshooting I noticed that some API endpoints didn’t result in the error e.g. http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/id=abcdefg/network/updates?scope=self. At this point I realised the issue was probably the tilde (‘~’) character in the URI.
Grasping at straws I manually replaced the tilde with it’s URL friendly equivalent ‘%7E’ and the callout worked perfectly. Now this is strange because I am, in the course of making the callout, URL encoding all parts of the endpoint URL. It seems that for some reason the LinkedIn OAuth services needs to have the tilde encoded twice when signing the request 
Force.com vs GAE + GWT
Salesforce could be regarded as the cloud computing leader but history tells us that many-a-giant has fallen before. Apple has; Microsoft has; IBM has. I think Salesforce is still on the up ‘n up, but there are contenders out there and some of them are noteworthy; probably the most obvious of these is Google. Over the past few months I’ve dug into the Google cloud platform and I thought it was time to attempt a side-by-side comparison of my two favourite PaaS providers.
The bigger they are ...
Some quick definitions are probably in order:
Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service offering from Salesforce, the first of its kind allowing developers to build multi tenant applications that are hosted on their servers as a service.
Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java. Read the rest of this entry »
The Silver Lining 