Hi Stefan,
good to have you o board,
On 21 Feb 2009, at 00:16, Stefan Karpinski wrote:
I think that nailing this problem would go a *long* way towards making
CouchDB popular not only for it's nice distributed properties and
such, but also because would make writing modern web apps drastically
easier. Because literally *every* non-trivial web application needs to
do user authentication. Having it _just work_ without having to worry
about it is a massive win. Moreover, if the database was actually
aware of application-level authentication and could enforce it, then
it would increase the security of CouchDB-based web apps. Errors in
business logic would be much less likely to accidentally expose data.
How easy is it to forget in Rails that you need to filter the objects
in some table by the user_id field?
My thoughts* exactly!
* http://markmail.org/message/thqtiuz3a5hr2ngd
Cheers
Jan
--
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Chris Anderson <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Stefan Karpinski
<[email protected]> wrote:
I'm not entirely clear what level of user auth is being addressed
here.
On the one hand, there's the system-level sense of a user that
traditional
databases have: i.e. something equivalent to a UNIX user account,
but in the
database, which has to be created by an admin and can then be
granted
table-level access and various administrative rights (create user,
create
database, create table).
On the other hand, there's the application-level sense of user:
i.e. a
record in a users table, which is given access or not given access
to
database records via the web application stack at a higher level,
which sits
between the database and the client's web browser (or whatever).
The current CouchDB notion of admin user seems to fall into the
former
category, while what most applications need falls into the latter
category.
One irritation of all application-level authentication schemes
I've ever
encountered is that the database does not give you any support for
application-level user auth. If CouchApps are really going to be
feasible,
CouchDB (clearly) needs to solve the application-level user
authentication
problem.
My sense is that the goal is to somehow merge the two senses of
database
user, and thereby cleave the Gordian knot in two. Is that sense
correct?
I wish I could say we've got such a clear picture of it.
The easiest way to cleave the knot is probably to rely on 3rd party
auth like OpenID or OAuth (I don't quite know which parts of which
we're interested in).
Identifying users as URLs would make things easier on application
devs, I think.
If every app will need to implement something like this, it makes
sense to me to have the CouchDB host manage the session, even if apps
can keep their own user-preferences docs if they wish. Being logged
into all the apps on a node seems a lot more intuitive than having to
create accounts for each one. If the user is identified with a URL,
then preferences etc can be replicated to other hosts while
everything
"just works".
Thanks for the feedback!
--
Chris Anderson
http://jchris.mfdz.com
