Google API & password storage

Hey all, I would like some advice from the programming community. I am building an application that will frequently need access to a user's google account through an API i'm building. What would be the best to go to about doing this? As I understand i开发者_如何学运维t, if I use the Zend framework with the multi client access model, the user would need to type in their credentials every time the application needs to access the data base? The other method would require me to store the user's credentials. I would prefer not to for security purposes, but if I must, what would be the way to do it?

So far, the optimal solution in mind mind looks something like this: my app generate an api key for each user. every api call would send this key, which would enable the app to access their account credentials which it would use to login to google and access the data I need. What do you guys think?

Sounds like a great use case for OAuth, so your users would basically just authorize your application's access once, and you don't have to store their credentials.