Get into OAuth2 with Client Credentials Grant

One of the possible barriers toward OAuth2 going completely mainstream is the likely association of OAuth2 with what big social media providers do and the assumption OAuth2 is only suitable for their business, for the way their users interact with these providers.

In fact, OAuth2 is more embracing. Client Credentials grant, one of several standard OAuth2 grants,  provides the easy path for the traditional clients toward starting working with security tokens.

The client, instead of doing the authentication with a name and a password (or some other client credentials) against the target service endpoint on every request (and thus having to keep these secrets for a long time) does it only once, against OAuth2 AccessTokenService which accepts various grants and returns manageable tokens with a restricted lifetime. Such tokens can be obtained out-of-band, with the client applications initialized with the tokens. The client will use the token only when authenticating against the endpoint. It is still a secret in its own way but it is a transient one that can be revoked by the administrator or by the client itself.

The client credentials grant provides for an easy and fast way into the OAuth2 ecosystem. Consider experimenting with it sooner rather than waiting for another 5 years :-), discover the OAuth2 world along the way, find how OAuth2 can positively affect your applications, and never look back again !