Re: high level design from wiki

>I agree if that refers to a specific implementation.
>I disagree if that means defining a new abstraction
>for a user repository. LDAP is pretty much the standard
>protocol for accessing user repositories, and JNDI
>gives a standard API for accessing an LDAP server.

+1

>>As for the default one, I
>>think we should consider the deployment steps required for a user to
>>get the gallery up and running, and use the ones that keep these steps
>>to a minimum.

+1



>Eventually, we'll need some registration and
>management of friends. But that functionality is
>not specific to a photo gallery. We can go looking
>for existing components at least for the registration.
>Every BB forum, wiki and web mail service does
>that kind of thing. At that point, we'll get into
>all sorts of trouble to keep out spam bots, to
>allow for email confirmation, and so on.
>Managing a list of friends or contacts is a common
>feature of social networks, or so I've heard. You
>send out invitations of some sort that need to be
>delivered and accepted to establish mutual friendship.
>Simply giving everybody full read access to the user
>repository so they can claim friendship with everybody
>will not play well with privacy expectations.

This is what I had always envisioned when stating "user 
management".  Possibly a poor choice of words but the closest thing I 
could come up with to what I thought needed implemented.  Perhaps we 
should start calling it "friend management" instead.

>By taking the LDAP approach, we can profit from
>existing LDAP based tools, or create components
>that are re-usable outside of the PicaGalley context.

+1


>When somebody tries to integrate the photo gallery
>with some existing "Web 2.0" infrastructure, then
>there will already be a user management system.
>Having our own instead of interfacing with a
>standard LDAP won't help then.

Could we eventually just make "friend management" pluggable?  Would 
that be easier than even going the LDAP route?  I guess we have to 
have a default though for those setting up a standalone system.


>I guess you've figured out by now that I believe
>user management is something we shouldn't get into
>until we have a photo gallery backend to show and
>ideally a few potential users presenting real-life
>UM requirements and maybe offering help with
>implementing them :-)

It is definitely a latter part of the project task.


>>Having the access control done on the data store level allows low
>>level services (e.g REST access to pictures) to leverage the access
>>control in place without much extra code.

+1