In September of 2010, Twitter pulled the plug on Basic Authentication, imposing an open authorization (OAuth) security protocol on application developers. The trouble with OAuth? It's a wee bit complicated. Worse still, as of this writing, ColdFusion is noticeably absent from Twitter's API wiki, offering no libraries or examples to work from.
On the upside, a handful of ColdFusion solutions have surfaced, like the impressive Twitter4J Java library and a component library adapted from PHP by Harry Klein. But, if you're new to OAuth, then you may have found those solutions difficult to understand. Or perhaps you'd rather roll your own. Either way, I thought it worthwhile to compose an OAuth primer for ColdFusion developers. For the purposes of education, the code samples are traditional and heavily commented. I hope you find it helpful.
