Webfinger Client for Node.JS

In a previous post, I demonstrated how you could use webfinger with nothing more than curl.   This post is about how you can use webfinger from nodejs with a non-blocking webfinger client.

Code for node-webfinger is here on github.

The project contains a simple webfinger-buzz.js command line app that demonstrates the webfinger client. It uses webfinger to find a google buzz feed based on a gmail address, then fetches the updates as an Atom feed, and then prints out the latest entry from that feed.

This could be generalized to support any other webfinger-enabled site like yahoo (though it looks like they're using an older version of XRD which my code can't parse :/).

The webfinger-buzz.js client looks something like this:

var sys = require('sys'),
  http = require("http"),
  url = require("url"),
  atom = require("./lib/atom"),
  webfinger = require('./lib/webfinger-client');

if (process.argv.length < 3) {
  sys.puts("usage: " + process.argv[0] + " " + process.argv[1] + " <user uri>");
  process.exit();
}
 
var userUri =   process.argv[2];
 
sys.puts("fingering " + userUri);

var wf = new webfinger.WebFingerClient();
var fingerPromise = wf.finger(userUri);
fingerPromise.addCallback(function(xrdObj) {
  var statusLinks = xrdObj.getLinksByRel("http://schemas.google.com/g/2010#updates-from");
  var statusUrl = url.parse(statusLinks[0].getAttrValues('href')[0]);
  var httpClient = http.createClient(80, statusUrl.hostname);
  var path = statusUrl.pathname;
  if (statusUrl.search) {
    path += statusUrl.search;
  }
 
  var request = httpClient.request("GET", path, {"host": statusUrl.hostname});
 
  request.addListener('response', function (response) {
    response.setBodyEncoding("utf8");
    var body = "";
    response.addListener("data", function (chunk) {
      body += chunk;
    });
    response.addListener("end", function() {
      var atomParser = new atom.AtomParser(false);
      var atomPromise = atomParser.parse(body);
      atomPromise.addCallback(function(atomFeed) {
        sys.puts("Feed: " + atomFeed.title);
        sys.puts(atomFeed.entries.length + " entries");
        sys.puts("Updated: " + atomFeed.entries[0].updated);
        sys.puts(atomFeed.entries[0].title + ": " + atomFeed.entries[0].summary);
      });
    });
  });
  request.close();
});

hehe fingerPromise. Is that a generalization of pinkySwear?

In the process of writing this webfinger client I used a couple of libraries I found on teh internets: sax-js by Isaac Z. Schlueter - a SAX parser for nodejs, and this URI Template library by James Snell. Both worked well and I recommend them.

The remaining non-webfinger-specific pieces I needed were an XRD parser and an Atom parser, both for javascript and SAX (as opposed to DOM). I couldn't find much in the way of those, so I rolled my own. They are included in the node-webfinger project in the lib/ directory. They're pretty crude parsers but they worked for this example. I'll probably use them in other projects in the future and make improvements as necessary. Unless something better comes along. That seems inevitable.