The Impact of Google Sign-In JavaScript Platform Deprecation on Wijmo

March 29 2023

Wijmo offers convenient modules for connecting to a handful of cloud services. One of those services is our OAuth2 module which uses the Google Sign-In platform library.

From Google’s announcement:

WARNING: The support of Google Sign-In JavaScript platform library for Web is set to be deprecated after March 31, 2023.

By default, new client IDs are now blocked from using the older platform library; existing client IDs are unaffected. New client IDs created before July 29th, 2022 may set the plugin_name to enable use of the legacy Google platform library.

For more information, please see Deprecation and Sunset page.

Impact on Wijmo Customers

Luckily, Google has announced that your EXISTING apps will keep running (until they sunset the API). Google has not set the sunset deadline yet. So as of March 31st, 2023, you should not be impacted if you use wijmo.cloud.OAuth2 API from wijmo.

We researched migrating our OAuth2 code to use the new Google Identity Services, but it would break too much of our API. Therefore, we have decided to deprecate our wijmo.cloud.OAuth2 API. It will keep working with existing apps, but it should not be used for new apps.

We recommend that our customers who use wijmo.cloud.OAuth2 migrate to use Google Identity Services directly.

The new Google Identity Services API integrates cleanly with our other cloud APIs like Google Sheets and Firestore. So you can simply remove wijmo.cloud.OAuth2 usage and directly consume the Google Identity Services API.

Using Google Identity Services

Using the new Google Identity Services is quite simple. You should be able to use the same Client ID from your legacy project. Here are some basic instructions.

Include the script in your app:

<script src="https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client" async defer></script>

Insert the markup where you want the sign-in button to be:

      <div id="g_id_onload"
         data-client_id="YOUR_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID"
         data-login_uri="https://your.domain/your_login_endpoint"
         data-auto_prompt="false">
      </div>
      <div class="g_id_signin"
         data-type="standard"
         data-size="large"
         data-theme="outline"
         data-text="sign_in_with"
         data-shape="rectangular"
         data-logo_alignment="left">
      </div>

That’s it! This will handle everything you need to authenticate with Google. You can add verification and more on your own backend to make it more secure or access the data in the response, of course. Google has plenty of documentation on this API. You can even use a code generator to create the markup you see above.

Our online demos will soon be migrated to use the new Google Identity Services in case you’d like to follow them. We needed to put out this announcement sooner in order to ensure our customers are at ease on March 31st, 2023.

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