Solved Problems

While working a little big on Da Good Bitz, I've been taking the opportunity to use every new Rails tidbit out there that I can find. There's some cool new stuff, and most of that cool stuff actually has practical value. I decided quickly while playing around with things that I needed to get authentication out of the way quickly. Everything is restful now, which is unintuitive when applied to authentication (do you 'show' a session? Create perhaps?).

Enter Restful Authentication. Well, it doesn't really enter. You have to drag it in and then bolt it down to your app. I've seen numerous tutorials and the documentation on the github repository itself shows a lot of instructions and code that's needed just to get the plugin wired properly into the app, let alone install it. I'm a library maintainer who does so on my spare time as well, so I know it's hard to put in a lot of that polish. My gripe isn't about the library, but rather that this is the best Rails has to offer in terms of an authentication system (and it's third party).

I'm tempted to just write my own. It's not that hard. But I'm also trying to brush up some things for the workplace. What does Rails shops use internally? My guess is that it's custom for every app. That's unfortunate. One of the things that Rails brings to the table is structure. I can guess where everything is pretty easily, but authentication will be different for every app. Granted, there's a lot of different ways to do authentication, but I think we can agree that there's some pretty standard ways to go about it. I would think authentication in Rails would be a solved problem by now.