After some research I’ve settled on the FatSecret Platform API for the WebService I’m going to use. FatSecret is a webapp that does much of what I want to do on the desktop. In fact, it seems solid enough that a partnership in the future could be beneficial. However, until that magical day, I’m simply going to make use of their Food Database.
There are a couple bits of technology that I’ll be with here, REST (Cocoa libraries for it) and oauth. All REST requests are signed via oauth and provide the ability to store data on their server (they provide capabilities for tracking your food, exercise, etc). I won’t be making use of that functionality (possibly in the future), but even to gain access to the Food DB, I need to use oauth.
oauth was started by Blaine Cook and Chris Messina as a way to provide a mechanism to obtain secure data without having to provide information about their identity. Its intention is to allow access to multiple Web Services without logging into them all, but using a single oauth credential. Think Web Service Mashups.
So, I had two requirements to obtain some food data. I need to communicate with a Web Service via REST and authorize requests via oauth. After searching for my options, I came across MPOAuthConnection for Cocoa. I downloaded the project from Google Code and set off down the path.
