On the heels of the security announcement, there has been discussion on
removing ROP from the next major Cayenne release after 4.2.
ROP was modelled on a similar Java Client feature in Webobjects/EOF and
there is nothing else quite like it in other ORMs. The ability to just
use normal Cayenne operations from the client machine without worrying
about how those operations get to the server and data objects are returned.
It has some limitations:
* limited security. There is no simple way to add an authorisation layer
to restrict access to certain objects or fields. Authentication and
encryption are really simple, but per object authorisation is hard.
* Java client. Although it is possible to write Cayenne in other
languages, no one has done so. There was some work ages ago on
Cocoa/Objective C bindings. Java client UI (swing/javaFX) is not popular
these days.
* upgrading. You need to upgrade the client and server at the same time
But it is really quite neat. Maybe I'm a bit sentimental since I used to
use it extensively for many years. But I've moved onto react/js/browser
clients which means that server-client serialisation is now over
json/swagger/jackson/CXF. Authorisation is now easy and the client UI
more lovely.
Is anyone using ROP? Should we remove it from the next Cayenne and
reduce the burden of maintenance?
Ari
On 12/2/2022 8:50am, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
A patched version of Cayenne 4.1 (or earlier) will not be released
since we believe there are sufficient ways to avoid the issue and the
number of people using ROP is likely quite low. Given the security
model of ROP, it is also most likely used in a scenario where the
client is trusted.
