What is an Endpoint?

Question

I have been reading about oauth and it keeps talking about endpoints, I googled it no help, Please tell me what an endpoint is or link to somewhere that explains it thx ★✩

Answer 1

It's one end of a communication channel, so often this would be represented as the URL of a server or service.

Answer 2

End point, in the open id authentication lingo, is the URL to which you send (POST) the authentication request.

Excerpts from Google authentication API

To get the Google OpenID endpoint, perform discovery by sending either a GET or HEAD HTTP request to https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id. When using a GET, we recommend setting the Accept header to "application/xrds+xml". Google returns an XRDS document containing an OpenID provider endpoint URL.The endpoint address is annotated as:

<Service priority="0">
<Type>http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0/server&lt;/Type&gt; 
<URI>{Google's login endpoint URI}</URI> 
</Service>

Once you've acquired the Google endpoint, you can send authentication requests to it, specifying the appropriate parameters (available at the linked page). You connect to the endpoint by sending a request to the URL or by making an HTTP POST request.

Answer 3

All of the answers posted so far are correct, an endpoint is simply one end of a communication channel. In the case of OAuth, there are three endpoints you need to be concerned with:

1. Temporary Credential Request URI (called the Request Token URL in the OAuth 1.0a community spec). This is a URI that you send a request to in order to obtain an unauthorized Request Token from the server / service provider.
2. Resource Owner Authorization URI (called the User Authorization URL in the OAuth 1.0a community spec). This is a URI that you direct the user to to authorize a Request Token obtained from the Temporary Credential Request URI.
3. Token Request URI (called the Access Token URL in the OAuth 1.0a community spec). This is a URI that you send a request to in order to exchange an authorized Request Token for an Access Token which can then be used to obtain access to a Protected Resource.

Hope that helps clear things up. Have fun learning about OAuth! Post more questions if you run into any difficulties implementing an OAuth client.