[Chicago] Integrated wiki + forums

[Chris McAvoy]

Authentication...gah

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:

>
> We do that on openplans.org -- the blogs are WordPress, the wiki is a
> modified Plone (as well as the mailing list), and then we have some other
> smaller pieces.  We implement common auth by having Plone drive the
> authentication, and then sync up its user db with WordPress, and some
> WordPress code to read Plone's auth cookie.
>
> ClueMapper is using Deliverance to tie together a couple other pieces
> (Trac, a paste-bin, and a time tracker):
> http://projects.serverzen.com/pm/p/cluemapper
>

IBM has a social network product that we're using internally at PSC called
Connections.  It's not too shabby, but it seems like something that could
just as well be a loose conflagration of best of breed tools.  The missing
piece, imho, is that single sign on authentication / authorization service.

A few months ago, I spend a great deal of time setting up CAS (
http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/) and getting it to run with Django.
Massimo has done the same with KPAX.

CAS has a really simple API, and does a good job of allowing you to choose
from a variety of auth backends (ldap, database...other stuff), it then
passes credentials back to the applications through a token...it's up to the
apps to handle authorization bits.  It's a nice scheme.  HOWEVER, CAS is a
total pain to set up.  At least, it was for me, as its a JEE app.

I know that there's some sorts of movement towards distributed auth schemes,
but none of them seem to tackle single sign on for internal apps.  It's a
space that's sort of been abandoned by Python folks.

It's really yet another case of the Java enterprise guys handing us our
asses by providing a few tools that end up making a ton of sense.

Anywho, I started drafting the above as a blog post last week...kind of
funny timing.

Chris
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