Reading The Whole Article Helps

posted by pope on June 28, 2008 at 8:55 am

Back from my week on Cape Cod, today is the day I get to unpack. And then pack again. I'll be moving into my new suite/apartment/on-campus housing in West Village A South tomorrow (Sunday). This isn't exactly where I'm living, but the same building, so close enough.





It's all leading up to my impending co-op start on the 2nd, this Wednesday. My adventures at Endeca will be well-documented here. As far as the company privacy policy lets me, anyway.

In other news, I saw on ReadWriteWeb an article about Google adopting something called OAuth for all the Google Data APIs. Obviously this is a big deal for the people behind OAuth, to be not only backed, but implemented in some of the most important services offered by someone like Google.

But then that brings up a question in my mind. OAuth and OpenID. Same difference? At first I was pretty unhappy with what I was reading. I mean, OpenID has been making progress in unifying logins across the web, and here comes a new system pressing for the same goal? That only defeats the whole purpose of unified logins if we have multiple services providing this system. I suppose two logins is better than 3000, but what happens when every programmer decides he doesn't like the available options and throws together another new "unifying service." The whole idea dies, that's what.

But then I realized that sometimes I should read before I think such things.

The About OAuth site explains that OAuth's goal is to be the valet key that you hand out to let people access a specific part of your password-protected life, but still restrict everything they don't need, the same way a valet key will open the car door and start the engine, but not open the trunk or unlock the glove box. However, OpenID is a master skeleton key, that would allow you to open all your car doors and trunks and glove boxes and everything else, with just a single key. OAuth is for developers to allow easy access only to certain features (like a service provider or data) and OpenID is for anyone to have easy authentication on any site.

Well, now that makes perfect sense.

            
tags: personal, co-op, Endeca, development, OAuth, OpenID, all tags
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