February 15th 2010
November 17th 2009
Getting back on track
Yes, I’m alive.
Since the second half of last summer I’ve been inactive in the Free Software arena. No commits, no emails from me in the last few months which may indicate that the projects are dead. So I wanted to write to let you know that I have no plans to stop maintaining any of my projects. I will start to catch up with all the things I’ve missed in the projects I normally contribute to and the projects I develop alone.
The reason why you’d heard nothing from me is that I left Spain to move to Oxford, in order to work at the cool company behind 2degreesnetwork.com. The removal was the most time-consuming and stressful thing I’d ever done, but after one month working here, I’m happy to say that it was worth it. The atmosphere is just like I thought Web 2.0 companies were, and I am surrounded by nice and talented people. I can’t be happier.
Well, back to the projects, I had to wait a lot to get access to the Internet at home, but I got it a couple of weeks ago and have been catching up (slowly) with the pending stuff. I still have a huge stack of unanswered emails, for example.
For the last couple of weeks I was working fulltime on repoze.what 1.1 and repoze.what-django. I hope to finish the documentation and get the first alpha releases out very soon; the code itself is pretty much ready and, as usual, fully tested. I didn’t have plans to do a repoze.what 1.1 release anytime soon, but while developing repoze.what-django I found myself implementing something which would be useful outside Django (i.e., ACLs) and thus I decided to move it to repoze.what.
After that, I want to improve the auth documentation in TurboGears 2. repoze.what-pylons is the crucial part of the repoze.what integration in TG2 and it’s fully documented, but duplicating part of those docs won’t do any harm and adding some tips and tricks would be nice. I started doing that some months ago but never committed it; I have to finish it this time.
Then I’d like to make repoze.what-pylons take advantage of the new features in repoze.what 1.1, like repoze.what-django already does.
That’s it for the foreseeable future. Next year I really want to get serious with Booleano and PyACL.
October 27th 2008
Auth: What you may expect from TurboGears 2
Those still using TurboGears 1 will find a big improvement in the authentication and authorizarion area when they upgrade to version 2: TurboGears 2 ships with an easy-to-use, pluggable, extendable and well-documented authentication and authorization system, powered by repoze.who and tgext.authorization (whose documentation will be available along with TurboGears’ very soon).
Some of the features include:
- You may store your users’ credentials where you want – in a database, an LDAP server, an .htacess file, etc.
- You’ll be able to store your groups and permissions where you like too, but also use as much as group and permission sources as you need. What if your application’s main database already stores your groups and permissions data, but the company’s IT department needs to reuse their Htgroups file in the application? That would be a piece of cake.
- You’ll be able to manage your authorization settings with an API independent of the used source(s) (databases, Ini files, etc). Yes, add/edit/delete groups and/or permissions.
- You’ll be able to grant permissions to anonymous users (hopefully available this week).
- Do the above and more without writing too much code.
Right now there’s only the SQL plugin, so in the mean time you may still only store your groups and permissions in a SQLAlchemy or Elixir managed database, but very soon we’ll have the Ini plugin (to store groups and permissions in *.ini files) and even more.
In the future you’ll also be able to get OpenId authentication with a couple of lines of code (there’s a work in progress) and possibly OAuth authorization too.
And you may give it a try now! You can either try the latest code from the trunk or wait for the first TG2 beta which will hopefully be released in a couple of days.
September 8th 2008
Enable LDAP authentication in your WSGI applications!
repoze.who.plugins.ldap is an straightforward yet powerful solution to enable LDAP authentication in your WSGI application. It enables you to have LDAP authentication working in your new or existing applications, in few minutes and with few lines of code!
It’s a plugin for the repoze.who framework, featuring not only an LDAP authenticator, but also related utilities. It’s a fully documented project which also ships with a working demo application, so it’d be hard for you to get stuck.
I wrote this plugin in order to enable LDAP authentication in Animador. And in fact, it’s the first application that uses the plugin.
The latest version is 1.0, and you’re highly encouraged to play with it and give feedback!
