Authenticating with Facebook Connect

Building a scalable authentication system is hard. Though it may seem easy—create a table or a list of users and their credentials, change that list using a simple web form, and you're done!

If your goal is to create a scalable system that can grow as your user base grows then you will need to do much more. It will be necessary to create e-mail systems and scalable databases, session management, and the many other subsystems essential to satisfying the user's expectation of a low-latency path from sign-up to sign-in to the desired content.

Let's put together what we've learned with AWS with Connect, Facebook's authentication service. You can see the full code for this example in the /facebook folder of your code bundle available at the Packt website.

To begin, visit developers.facebook.com, set up a developers account, and then create an application. Remember to properly set your application path as shown in the following screenshot:

Once registered, find...