laravel - OAuth or JWT? Which one to use and why?

Question

I am starting to learn about token based authentication and I am trying to learn how to implement it in Laravel 5. I have come across two very popular technologies for doing this but I am confused since I am new to both these technologies.

This article at Medium says I should go with lucadegasperi/oauth2-server-laravel which I am sure is a very popular package in the community judging by the number of stars on Github and the number of references that have led me to it. This one is supposed to help me with OAuth implementation.

This other article at Scotch.io encourages me to use tymondesigns/jwt-auth which is also very popular again judging by the number of stars on Github.

At this point I am indecisive of which one to use mostly because I am a novice developer and I haven't worked with either of them.

Could anyone point out to me what are the pros and cons to each one of them and which one I should implement? Will my project type also dictate what kind I should use? And how?

Moreover if you are making an argument that I should choose one over the other, could you also point out good resources that would help me start with them. Other than the two links I provided myself of course.

Answer 1

JWT is a simple authentication protocol, Oauth is an authentication framework.

An experienced developer will take about a month to fully understand and implement Oauth. An experienced developer can pick up the JWT protocol in about a day of reading the specifications. So basically, it boils down to your specific use-case.

If you want simple stateless http authentication to an api, then JWT is just fine and relatively quick to implement, even for a novice developer.

A few JWT resources for you:

• http://jwt.io/
• https://auth0.com/docs
• http://www.toptal.com/web/cookie-free-authentication-with-json-web-tokens-an-example-in-laravel-and-angularjs

And an Oauth resource:

• http://tutorials.jenkov.com/oauth2/overview.html