I mentioned this in passing on a different thread, but wanted to make sure my understanding of how Guacamole extensions works is correct, and, if it is, discuss a potential change.
As I understand it, today, for a Guacamole Extension that includes Java, server-side code, to be loaded and run by the main Guacamole client application, it has to be considered an "authentication provider," which means specifying the authProvider tag in the manifest file and then implement/extending a certain set of authentication provider classes. Am I understanding this correctly, or is it just because that's all I've ever seen/written? Assuming that understanding is correct, it seems like there have been enough instances lately of people wanting to implement extensions that aren't really authentication providers. Things like "Wake on LAN," and server status (ping) aren't really authentication modules, and, yet, if they want to execute some action on the Tomcat (etc.) side, they have to implement the authentication provider classes. Maybe it's time to create a few more directions extensions can go? One suggestion would to be to split out the idea of "authentication provider" from "connection provider" such that extensions that only provide connections (like QuickConnect, as an example) don't also have to provide the authentication framework. I know there are definitely some downsides to this, so I'm just opening up the discussion at this point - for instance, sometimes providing connections also means controlling who has access to them, as is the case with the JDBC module, but it seems like there could be some more distinctive extension types there. Beyond that, maybe it would be possible to create a more generic extension that could do things like provide REST APIs and manipulate the web client (obviously that last part already works with things like branding), on top of which authentication extensions (etc.) could be built. Does that make sense? Or am I missing something that can already be done in the Guacamole client? Other thoughts? -Nick
