[MOBY-dev] primitive datatype: Password

[Sebastien Carrere]

Hi Pieter,


> 1. There is already a password datatype in the object ontology that 
> you can use... It's not a primitive, but I don't see why it would have 
> to be. It currently simply inherits from Object. Hence Password ISA 
> Object. (There has been some discussion on wether or not to create 
> more specialised objects without adding any children, but Password has 
> been around for several years now...)
Yes, I've seen this existing object, but it can not be used as a 
Secondary input type (because secondary only accept primitive as far as 
I know)
>
> 2. Secondaries are something different than Primitives. The Primitives 
> are always (part of) primary inputs or outputs and the primitives are 
> therefore part of the object ontology. Note that secondary inputs or 
> outputs are not part of the object ontology. The secondaries do come 
> in exactly the same flavors as the primitives: "String", "Integer", 
> "DateTime", "Float", "Boolean". So I can understand the confusion...
>
> Hence with what is currently available you can already use:
> * A Password object as primary input.
> * A String primitive with the articleName attribute password or 
> something similar.
> * A secondary input of type String with the articleName attribute 
> password or something similar.
This last point is exactly what I plan to do, but we have to use the 
same articleName (password is a good one) to be able to identify such 
particular parameters.

>
> There are several services that use similar constructs. They all work 
> just fine. The only problem is that there is no standardised mechanism 
> for authentication in BioMoby, which is not so user friendly.... A 
> standardised mechanism would be nice and having a password and 
> optional login/accountname as primaries or secondaries makes sense to 
> me. All we would have to do is agree on the object (for primaries) or 
> type (for secondaries) and articleName for these.... Theoretically a 
> secondary input is optional and a client should be able to leave it 
> out. Most secured services will require a password though, so one can 
> argue that passwords and logins must be primary inputs. I don't think 
> it matters too much. As long as we standardise on something it would 
> make it easier for clients to figure out how to do authentication.
>
> There are several people who will probably suggest to handle logins 
> and password on a different level. You can do it on the transport 
> level, on the web server level, in the SOAP layer or you could use 
> WSRF et al. Some of these would be theoretically more elegant, but 
> they usually cause more overhead and more time to implement. Doing it 
> in BioMoby ourselves is peanuts and gives us more control on how to do 
> it: no external dependancies, libraries, etc. So I think handling 
> authentication in BioMoby is the more pragmatic solution. My services 
> use the Password object for several years now: it was easy to 
> implement and works just fine :)
I totally agree with your point of view, becasue in our case, 
web-services are just wrapped programs that we use also as cli and as 
Mobyle services. That's why we have to deal authentication directly at 
the web-service/script level and not at the transport level.
And as you say, using secondary inputs seems the best way to allow 
public-users (non authetified ones) to access limited web-services and 
registered-users to access full ones.

So I'm going to use Secondary inputs of type String with the articleName 
attribute password.


Sebastien




>> Bonjour a tous,
>>
>> What do you think about setting a new primitive datatype "Password" 
>> in addition to "String", "Integer", "DateTime", "Float", "Boolean"?
>>
>> We plan to use secondary inputs to control some web-services access 
>> (using login/password).
>> Defining such a primitive datatype for parameters could be usefull 
>> for web interface: we could deal with this kind of parameters as we 
>> do with password fields in HTML forms.
>>
>> What is your point of view ?
>>
>> Merci,
>>
>> Sebastien
>> <Sebastien_Carrere.vcf>_______________________________________________
>> MOBY-dev mailing list
>> MOBY-dev at lists.open-bio.org
>> http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/moby-dev
>
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