[ANN] Resurrection of the Login Engine

I have posted some code that is an attempt to resurrect the Login Engine
after it’s death about a year ago[1]. You can find it in the following
two plugins:

http://loginui.rubyforge.org/
http://authentication.rubyforge.org/

The two related plugins are the Login Plugin (which is the frontend
engine code) and authentication (which is the backend pluggable
authentication code). This code is entirely new that has come out of my
own development needs for my work. It does borrow ideas from the old
Login engine (same feature set, same basic hashing method) but I have
made the following enhancements in my version:

  • Follows a more RESTful design to be more in-line with the current
    methods of development.
  • Moved the actual authentication process into a separate plugin
    (authentication) that has a pluggable architecture to allow different
    authentication processes (perhaps you want to auth against a LDAP server
    or a POP3 server instead of a salted hash in the database).
  • Tries to be more overrideable based on my own frustration with the
    old Login Engine.

I realize that not everybody likes the idea of a generic login engine.
Some people prefer the generator approach that Restful Authentication
plugin[2] provides. For highly custom apps I agree 100%! But for my
bread and butter (quick internal custom apps) the ability slap on a good
login process exactly what I need.

I hope it is useful to others and I welcome patches.

  1. http://rails-engines.org/news/2007/01/23/farewell-login_engine-/
  2. http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/restful_authentication