MerbAuth – Merb Authentication

An extensible architecture for authentication

• Stupidly Simple
• Speaks fluent HTTP, even the errors
• Pluggable Architecture (so that you can use any authentication algorithms you like)
• Cascading Authentication (if one method fails, another is attempted, then another. When no methods succeed, authentication fails)

Principles

1. Sessions are authenticated, not users.
2. Just because one method of authentication fails doesn’t mean the session, can’t be authenticated another way. This is especially true if your application has an external API as well as a public interface.
3. HTTP has built-in Errors which every web-browser (should) know how to speak. If you’re application speaks in HTTP Verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE), it should also serve the correct HTTP Errors when things go wrong.