On Sun, 5 Mar 2006 11:41:06 +0100, mauro cicio wrote: > > Better would be things like Bill Katz's recent post on defining a common > > DSL for authentication. > > The service registry becomes Usenet and the Rails wiki. > > The protocol becomes "authors talk to each other". > > The pointer is Google, and the naming convention is decided by > > the authors for any given service... > > I am not familiar with Bill Katz's work, I'll check it out.
The basic idea was "let's have all the authentication engines/plugins use a common domain-specific language". That way, an engine that depends on the presence of authentication doesn't need to search a registry; it can just use the One True Permission Syntax and whatever engine is installed will do the work. We've already started down this road, as I believe all the current auth schemes create @current_user. I wouldn't imagine that any app author would install multiple, conflicting auth engines, so I don't see a need for a service registry. > Actually the whole topic started from your statement: > >>> Another thing to think about: You want the engine to be easily >>> extensible without folks having to modify the actual engine files, or >>> cut-and-paste huge swaths of code. Oh, God, what have I done! :) I was just musing that the engine should be written with lots of small routines, so that it's easy for end-user-developers (not other engines) to override specific methods by redefining them. As James pointed out, UserEngine and LoginEngine could do this if they were refactored. If each user_controller.rb action were a series of function calls and a CONFIG-like hash of strings, rather than inline string manipulation and business rules, it'd be easy for a given app to change only the desired behaviors and strings. _______________________________________________ engine-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rails-engines.org/listinfo.cgi/engine-users-rails-engines.org
