Monday, May 28, 2012

OpenID logins


Third party user authentication is popular these days.  This allows you to use one login id with multiple websites.

You may want to use OpenId with your Rdbhost backed website, to give your users the convenience of using their single-login.  OpenId is one of the two widely used third pary authentication protocols.

We have added OpenId verification to our API.  You can invite your users to login using OpenId, present that login request to the Rdbhost server using the JavaScript API, and the server will handle the verification process and return the outcome to you, along with a session key (if authenticated) for that user to access your database services.  Note that this session key is just a key for use in authenticating a user, or authorizing database access; coding the key-based constraints is an app design issue.

Third party login is quite appealing to users, and seems to be becoming an expected feature of new web apps.  We are happy to support this for your Rdbhost hosted apps.

OpenID login is enabled from your profile page on the Rdbhost website.  When the feature is enabled, a new schema 'auth' is created, a simple user tracking table is created there, and a PL/pgSQL database procedure is created for you to handle OpenID logins.  You can override this procedure with your own, to implement custom login handling.

An example is at:
http://www.paginaswww.com/rdb/examples/openid-login.html

and details are at:
http://www.rdbhost.com/openid_login.html

The jQuery plugin has been updated as well, to support OpenID logins:
http://github.com/rdbhost/Rdb.js