Robert,
Yes, I agree. This certainly doesn't have to be part of hunchentoot. However, I see an opportunity for lightweight hunchentoot-specific user authentication/authorization package that could provide this functionality. Moreover, some minor tweaks to hunchentoot might make this an easier task. I'd like to stay away from a full-fledged web framework ala UCW or weblocks, however, and I'm willing to 1) make this library totally hunchentoot-specific and 2) if necessary propose modifications to hunchentoot that would facilitate the implementation of this library. In particular, the hunchentoot dispatch stuff, while flexible, could, I think, be improved in ways that would make the implementation of this library more facile. But I'm just brainstorming at the moment and don't have any concrete examples, other than the fact that meta-dispatch stuff feels like it might be cleaner with some sort of CLOS custom method combination might. Then again, it's flexible enough that this can be implemented on top of the existing stuff with little penalty, so perhaps I should explore that instead of just writing windy emails...
Yes, to be clear, this discussion is more about my half-baked ideas for the future of hunchentoot-auth than it is about changes to hunchentoot to include some user authentication framework.
Thanks for listening,
Cyrus
On Apr 12, 2008, at 5:45 PM, Robert Synnott wrote:
To me, this seems like pushing Hunchentoot more in the direction of being a web framework than just a webserver. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but it could probably be just as easily done with a library that sits on top and implements a light-weight framework. Rob