Java Facebook Login with OAuth Authentication

Last modified on October 16th, 2014 by Joe.

This Java tutorial is to help implement authentication in Java using Facebook OAuth Login API. We will be using Java and a JSON parser API and other than that we will not use any third-party component. Facebook is not providing any sdk for Java client.

Apart from Spring Social I couldn’t find any reputable Java SDK for Facebook integration. With a Json parser we can handle everything ourselves. In this tutorial, we will see how to use Facebook to implement an authentication in a custom Java application and get Facebook profile data like name, email and gender.

Facebook Web Application

We need to create a web application in Facebook. After logging in to https://developers.facebook.com/ under Apps menu click “Create a New App”

Facebook Application Settings

We need to specify the application callback url in the FB settings. This will be used by the FB server on authentication to hand back control to our application.

There is a lot of discussion about how Facebook will directly call our “localhost” as it will not be visible to it. Facebook will never call the application URL directly. A request will be sent back as response to the client browser with the callback url. The browser does the request. A sequence diagram given below explains the flow of control in authentication using Facebook OAuth.

Facebook OAuth Authentication Sequence Flow

On access of an url or in welcome page the Facebook Login button is shown. The user will click the FB button to login into the Java web application. On click of that button a Facebook URL will be invoked.
Facebook will validate the application ID and then will redirect to its login page.

User will enter the FB login credentials and submit the form.
Facebook will validate the credentials and then redirect back to the browser with a request to forward to the redirect_url. Redirect_url is the URL in our application which will take care of further processing.
Browser will call the redirect url.
Redirect URL page will again call the Facebook to request for access_token.
Facebook on validation success will respond back with access_token.
Redirect URL page will again call the Facebook to request for user data by sending the access_token.
Facebook on validating the access_token will respond back with user data requested.
Redirect URL page will forward to a page showing user data in the client browser.

Facebook Login Page

Screen shot shown in the start of this tutorial is the login page in our application and following is the code.

<%@page import="com.javapapers.java.social.facebook.FBConnection"%>
<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
	pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<%
	FBConnection fbConnection = new FBConnection();
%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Java Facebook Login</title>
</head>
<body style="text-align: center; margin: 0 auto;">
	<div
		style="margin: 0 auto; background-image: url(./img/fbloginbckgrnd.jpg); height: 360px; width: 610px;">
		<a href="<%=fbConnection.getFBAuthUrl()%>"> <img
			style="margin-top: 138px;" src="./img/facebookloginbutton.png" />
		</a>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

Application redirect URL

Following is the page the Facebook issues a redirect request to the browser.

package com.javapapers.java.social.facebook;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Map;

import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.ServletOutputStream;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

public class MainMenu extends HttpServlet {

	private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
	private String code="";

	public void service(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
			throws ServletException, IOException {		
		code = req.getParameter("code");
		if (code == null || code.equals("")) {
			throw new RuntimeException(
					"ERROR: Didn't get code parameter in callback.");
		}
		FBConnection fbConnection = new FBConnection();
		String accessToken = fbConnection.getAccessToken(code);

		FBGraph fbGraph = new FBGraph(accessToken);
		String graph = fbGraph.getFBGraph();
		Map<String, String> fbProfileData = fbGraph.getGraphData(graph);
		ServletOutputStream out = res.getOutputStream();
		out.println("<h1>Facebook Login using Java</h1>");
		out.println("<h2>Application Main Menu</h2>");
		out.println("<div>Welcome "+fbProfileData.get("first_name"));
		out.println("<div>Your Email: "+fbProfileData.get("email"));
		out.println("<div>You are "+fbProfileData.get("gender"));		
	}

}

Facebook Get Access Token

package com.javapapers.java.social.facebook;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.net.URLEncoder;

public class FBConnection {
	public static final String FB_APP_ID = "234231262685378";
	public static final String FB_APP_SECRET = "y2a73dede3n49uid13502f5ab8cdt390";
	public static final String REDIRECT_URI = "http://localhost:8080/Facebook_Login/fbhome";

	static String accessToken = "";

	public String getFBAuthUrl() {
		String fbLoginUrl = "";
		try {
			fbLoginUrl = "http://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?" + "client_id="
					+ FBConnection.FB_APP_ID + "&redirect_uri="
					+ URLEncoder.encode(FBConnection.REDIRECT_URI, "UTF-8")
					+ "&scope=email";
		} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return fbLoginUrl;
	}

	public String getFBGraphUrl(String code) {
		String fbGraphUrl = "";
		try {
			fbGraphUrl = "https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?"
					+ "client_id=" + FBConnection.FB_APP_ID + "&redirect_uri="
					+ URLEncoder.encode(FBConnection.REDIRECT_URI, "UTF-8")
					+ "&client_secret=" + FB_APP_SECRET + "&code=" + code;
		} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return fbGraphUrl;
	}

	public String getAccessToken(String code) {
		if ("".equals(accessToken)) {
			URL fbGraphURL;
			try {
				fbGraphURL = new URL(getFBGraphUrl(code));
			} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
				e.printStackTrace();
				throw new RuntimeException("Invalid code received " + e);
			}
			URLConnection fbConnection;
			StringBuffer b = null;
			try {
				fbConnection = fbGraphURL.openConnection();
				BufferedReader in;
				in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
						fbConnection.getInputStream()));
				String inputLine;
				b = new StringBuffer();
				while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
					b.append(inputLine + "\n");
				in.close();
			} catch (IOException e) {
				e.printStackTrace();
				throw new RuntimeException("Unable to connect with Facebook "
						+ e);
			}

			accessToken = b.toString();
			if (accessToken.startsWith("{")) {
				throw new RuntimeException("ERROR: Access Token Invalid: "
						+ accessToken);
			}
		}
		return accessToken;
	}
}

Access Facebook Graph Profile Data

package com.javapapers.java.social.facebook;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

public class FBGraph {
	private String accessToken;

	public FBGraph(String accessToken) {
		this.accessToken = accessToken;
	}

	public String getFBGraph() {
		String graph = null;
		try {

			String g = "https://graph.facebook.com/me?" + accessToken;
			URL u = new URL(g);
			URLConnection c = u.openConnection();
			BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
					c.getInputStream()));
			String inputLine;
			StringBuffer b = new StringBuffer();
			while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
				b.append(inputLine + "\n");
			in.close();
			graph = b.toString();
			System.out.println(graph);
		} catch (Exception e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
			throw new RuntimeException("ERROR in getting FB graph data. " + e);
		}
		return graph;
	}

	public Map getGraphData(String fbGraph) {
		Map fbProfile = new HashMap();
		try {
			JSONObject json = new JSONObject(fbGraph);
			fbProfile.put("id", json.getString("id"));
			fbProfile.put("first_name", json.getString("first_name"));
			if (json.has("email"))
				fbProfile.put("email", json.getString("email"));
			if (json.has("gender"))
				fbProfile.put("gender", json.getString("gender"));
		} catch (JSONException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
			throw new RuntimeException("ERROR in parsing FB graph data. " + e);
		}
		return fbProfile;
	}
}

Facebook Authentication Success and Profile Data

Download Application Project Source

Facebook Login Using Java

Comments on "Java Facebook Login with OAuth Authentication"

Anonymous says:

17/07/2014 at 12:32 pm

Sound interesting. But did u check Apache Oltu – oauth protocol implementation in java.
Subash says:

17/07/2014 at 4:54 pm

HI Joe, this post is nice but when i am trying to login to facebook by using ur application. I am getting error like –

java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 400 for URL: graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=XXXXXX&expires=XXXXXXXXXXX
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(Unknown Source)
at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl.getInputStream(Unknown Source)
…
Jul 17, 2014 4:52:17 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve invoke
SEVERE: Servlet.service() for servlet [MainMenu] in context with path [/Facebook_Login] threw exception
java.lang.RuntimeException: ERROR in getting FB graph data. java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 400 for URL: graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=XXXXXX&expires=XXXXXXXXXXX
at com.javapapers.java.social.facebook.FBGraph.getFBGraph(FBGraph.java:38)
at com.javapapers.java.social.facebook.MainMenu.service(MainMenu.java:28)
…
can u help me out from this problem.
Joe says:

17/07/2014 at 5:26 pm

No, I have tried Apache Oltu yet. Will try soon and post a tutorial on it.
Joe says:

17/07/2014 at 5:27 pm

Subash,

You have almost got there. You are getting error at the last step, when you get profile data.

Comment email and gender. Get only the first_name and see if it works.
KrishnaSwathi says:

17/07/2014 at 6:17 pm

This is really very nice and in details.
Helped me a lot. Thank you
Sandeep Singh says:

18/07/2014 at 2:21 am

Thanks Joe .. Good Stuff :)
Firoz Shaikh says:

21/07/2014 at 3:06 pm

Nice one sir…
Joe says:

22/07/2014 at 10:43 am

Thanks Firoz.
Joe says:

22/07/2014 at 10:47 am

Welcome Sandeep.
Ajit says:

02/08/2014 at 5:15 pm

Very nice article on with facebook integration using oauth
Kavitha says:

05/08/2014 at 5:35 pm

Very good article
Raj says:

24/08/2014 at 9:24 pm

Hi Joe,
I was trying your application.I have added servlet-api jar and running with java 7 and tomcat 7 .it is giving 404 error for fbhome not available.
Raj says:

24/08/2014 at 10:00 pm

sorry joe. that was my mistake.its working.

thanks.
Raj says:

24/08/2014 at 10:05 pm

hi Joe,

the app is on my account. i am able to login and get the profile data.
but when i login with other account its showing the blank page.
venkatakrishna says:

25/08/2014 at 3:50 pm

hi Joe,

how to get friendslist from my account please send me that proper working code for getting friendsist ….

thanks,
Rahul Jha says:

27/08/2014 at 1:56 am

Very good article. Just added your solution to my customer’s work.

Thanks
mahesh says:

27/08/2014 at 11:29 am

Hi joe,

will this work with the jboss7 server?
Joe says:

27/08/2014 at 11:56 am

Yes Mahesh. This should work in Jboss too. This solution is not dependent on any application server.
deepak says:

04/09/2014 at 11:50 am

joe it is giving 404 error fbhome not found
deepak says:

04/09/2014 at 12:55 pm

joe
i have done it thanks
deepak says:

04/09/2014 at 2:45 pm

joe,

the appid and appsecret i have created work only for one user
how can i get different user detials.
DV Singh says:

11/09/2014 at 12:30 am

Thank you so much for beautiful help
Ketan Patel says:

14/09/2014 at 5:01 pm

Hi joe,
I have implement fb login in my app.first i have make jsp file and implement fb login button cde in that jsp. then when user login thruw that jsp it responce me accesscode and profile details.but i have to reverify user profile details in my java code thruw that accessToken.so for that i have use that “https://graph.facebook.com/me?” + accessToken” call but it will give me 400 error. can you tell me way to get user profile details.
Ankit says:

15/09/2014 at 9:22 pm

how did u do it joe?
Ankit says:

15/09/2014 at 9:23 pm

*deepak
amrit says:

08/10/2014 at 1:34 pm

its good,Its working fine but how to implement it with fb logout button.please provide solution asap.its urgent
bhopendra singh lodhi says:

08/10/2014 at 6:17 pm

this is a very good solution of fb login button
bhopendra singh lodhi says:

08/10/2014 at 6:19 pm

its good,Its working fine but how to implement session .please provide solution. its urgent
swaminathan says:

16/10/2014 at 2:06 pm

hi joe,

its working, thank you so much..

Comments are closed for "Java Facebook Login with OAuth Authentication".