Google Federated Login vs Hybrid Protocol vs Google Data Authentication. Whats's the Difference?

Question

Hi, I am trying to implement Google Authentication in my website, in which I would also be pulling some Google Data using the Google Data API and I am using Google App Engine with Jinja2.

My question is, so many ways are mentioned to do it. I am confused between Google Federated Login,Google Data Protocol, Hybrid Protocol. Are these things the same or different ways to do the same thing.

From what I read and understood, which might be incorrect, Google Federated Login uses the hybrid protocol to authenticate and fetch the google data.

Is there a proper guide to implement any one of these in python. Examples which I found at the google link are kind of different. From what I understood,correct me if i am wrong, I have to implement only the OpenID Consumer part.

In order to implement Google Federated Login in Python, I saw that we need to download a separate library from the openid-enabled.com but I found a different library for the google data implementation at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/

As you can see, I am confused a lot :D. Please help me :)

Thanks

Answer 1

Here is an article specifically on Retrieving Authenticated Google Data Feeds with Google App Engine

The way I understand this example:

• You use the gdata-python-client to set up this AuthSub interaction
• gdata.auth.extract_auth_sub_token_from_url extracts the token you get from AuthSub (step 4 above)
• you can now use this token to access Google Data.