On Tuesday 09 January 2007 09:12, Andrew Zeneski wrote:
> Thinking about this a little more maybe we should consider breaking
> this down into two independent interfaces:
>
> org.ofbiz.security.AuthenticationHandler
> org.ofbiz.security.PermissionHandler

At this point I would like to pop in with a very basic criticism. I've always 
been a little confused by the use of user credentials as opposed to parties 
and, especially, the fact that the userLoginId is the primary key of the 
credentials.

I can see why you want to track which credential was used to perform a 
particular action and I can also see the argument that the whole party 
management app shouldn't always be a requirement for an OFBiz install. What 
doesn't make sense is that I can't do very basic things like have several 
different authentication schemes (ie: LDAP, SMB, Radius, Kerberos) attached 
to the same party with the same or varying userLoginId and same or different 
passwords or other shared secrets. Its also very vexing that I can't have 
duplicate userLoginIds for different parties in different authentication 
contexts (ie. multihomed multicontext ecommerce widget or whatever).

I really would like to see userLogins separated by some sort of "realm" and 
having their own IDs that are not the user identifier and potentially even 
their own tables if the shared secret is complex (ie. retina print or 
somethign). The base table could also specify an authenticating service call 
(service engine style) on a per credential basis (with a default?). It would 
be very nice, for instance, to integrate JPAM so that you could authenticate 
your ofbiz users off of your Samba server and handle password changes through 
it and so forth.

I'm thinking out loud a little here, obviously.

-- 
Ean Schuessler, CTO
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
214-720-0700 x 315
Brainfood, Inc.
http://www.brainfood.com

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