Ben Biddington

I started out intending to write some scala examples against the twitter API, however I soon discovered I needed OAuth first. Given that I use OAuth all the time at work I figured I could probably do with learning about it first-hand, while learning scala.

org.junit.rules._

I chose to test drive it with JUnit 4.7 and NetBeans.

NetBeans works almost immediately with scala, and has support for project templates etc — even scala JUnit fixtures.

UPDATE (2010-04-27) I have since discovered IntelliJ to be much better, and there is now a free community edition. IntelliJ supports scala without any fiddling around.

JUnit mostly works, though rules don’t and neither do some matchers. Even though rules don’t work, I have included it anyway because I have the t-shirt.

You can find the project on github.

Important abstractions

1. SignatureBaseString.
   1. Characterized by three ampersand-separated segments: verb, uri, parameters.
   2. URL Encoding must conform to RFC 3986, and the following characters should are consider unreserved so should not be encoded:
      ALPHA, DIGIT, ‘-‘, ‘.’, ‘_’, ‘~’
2. Signature.
   1. Signature is a keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC).
   2. Consumer secret required part of HMAC secret key.
   3. Token secret is optionally included in HMAC secret key:
      (consumer_secret, token_secret) => uri_encoded_consumer_secret&[uri_encoded_token_secret]
3. OAuthCredential. Represents the secret key(s) used to create the HMAC signature. OAuth requires a consumer credential, and optionally a token credential, representing the end user.

Now that these core concepts are complete, I am working on high-level policy, like classes for generating signed URLs and authorization headers.

Notes

JUnit — expecting exceptions in scala

Assuming JUnit 4.x, a test can expect an exception using the test annotation:

Java:

@Test(expected=IllegalArgumentException.class)
    public void ExampleThrowsException(){
        throw new IllegalArgumentException();
    }

This needs to be modified for scala:

Scala:

@Test { val expected=classOf[IllegalArgumentException] }
    def ExampleThrowsException {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException
    }

The reason for it is outlined here in the Java annotations section on named parameters.

Here is the documentation for scala annotations. Seealso: the documentation for scala 2.7.3 (includes dbc).

Closures and return

The return statement immediately returns from the current method, even if you’re within a closure. Omit return in this case — return is optional anyway.

When to use semicolon line terminator

Never — apart from:

• When a method returns Unit (equivalent to void) and you aren’t using return keyword. [TBD: Add example].

How to use blocks

var count = 1
times(2) { println("Printed " + count + " times")}
protected def times(count : Int)(block : => Unit) = {
    1.to(count).foreach((_) => block)
}

Seealso: some executable examples on github

References

• Scala oauth lib (Github)
• OAuth specification
• Scala 2.7.3 documentation
• OAuth ruby gem
• OAuth test client

ALPHA, DIGIT, '-', '.', '_', '~'