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By cornernote on
Hello All,
I would love to see a module to support the Universal PHP Authentication Replication System. This would allow sites to maintain user accounts between applications such as Phorum, phpBB, WebCalendar, PostNuke, Xaraya, Drupal and basically any system that has a user account.
This would solve the problem of forcing users to create an account for each of these applications running on a single site.
As soon as I get a free moment I will look into this further however before I start to code anything I would like to have some input from the drupal community.
Best regards,
Brett
Comments
Lost in Space
I have not seen a post from John Lim on the mailing list created on yahoo since last year and have been monitoring the project for almost one year. The RFC offers a lot of potential if it ever gets completed and accepted by the development community. In checking around earlier, I found that most folks were waiting for a final document and a base implementation to examine (John Cox, Xaraya; Marc LaPorte, TikiWiki, etc.). In fact I left a post a few days ago on his site to see if he would reply with a progress report.
There are a few holes that I see. It probably needs something like a system of smart queues to retain messages when a remote application on another web server is unhealthy and might need to include some sort of function for checking to determine if it was healthy before forwarding retained messages. Otherwise, a simple protocol may be necessary for holding transactional or conversational communications between applications.
With a protocol like the above, it might be possible to perform inter-application communication, moving beyond the goal of authentication replication. Based on the roadmap for Mambo Open Source 5.0, it looks like they appear to have something of a similar nature under development. The Krysalis platform from Interact has the bits and pieces within the framework to do the same.
mmx
One important issue: encoding
Nowhere in that spec is the data-encoding mentioned explicitly. There is a utf8_decode call in there once, for country, but that's it.
A universal auth system should really use UTF-8 for encoding its data. For Drupal this is not a problem, but I think there are still PHP applications which use legacy EUC or ISO encodings.