Spring Social is an extension of the Spring Framework to enable the development of social-ready applications. With Spring Social you can create applications that interact with various social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TripIt, giving the users of your application a more personal experience.
The main features of Spring Social include:
* A set of social network templates for interacting with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TripIt, and Greenhouse.
* An OAuth-aware request factory for signing RestTemplate requests with OAuth authorization details.
* A web argument resolver for extracting Facebook user ID and access token information in a Spring MVC controller.
Where possible, creating Web applications — including Ajax-based applications — in a RESTful way avoids a large class of bugs. However, a pitfall of REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is sending duplicate data across similar XMLHttpRequests. This tip shows how the moderate use of session cookies can maintain just enough server-side state to significantly reduce client-server traffic, while still allowing fallback to cookie-free operation.