Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

PHP OpenID Library/JanRain
By: Keith Watanabe
Published On: 2-17-2008

I'm SLOWLY plowing through this library.  It's really horribly documented.  There's almost no tutorials and the example code is poorly written.  Unfortunately, I haven't seen any other libraries with the flexibility as this one so I decided to implement it.

Well, I've managed to get my code to the point where I can authenticate round trip.  Now, it's up to me to finish up the whole login/registration process.  Tonight, I hit a major stumbling block where I didn't know that the stupid library uses the $_SESSION global behind the scenes in setting up some key values.  In my case, I do something where I shut the session down temporarily.  This is for login purposes.  However, when I did that, obviously, the library wasn't able to extract the data from the session.  Well, isn't that convenient!  The sample code for the consumer doesn't mention a damn thing about this.  And secondly, I'm now facing an issue where I'll have to figure out if this will disrupt anything during the login process that I wrote up.

On top of that, I spent hours logging various messages trying to figure out where the killer point was.  I had to go through those fugly libraries and went a bit nuts placing tons of data dumps all over the place.

Before this incident, I had tried building my own system but had numerous problems trying to get it to authenticate.  Then I realized that one of the return points wasn't setup yet and so the authentication server wasn't providing a response.  However, the library makes no real mention of this and I couldn't really see for a few days what was going on.

There's, of course, other hitches and hurdles that I'll probably face as I descend lower into the details of the library.  But I think when I nail this thing down, I'm going to write up a good tutorial so people won't have to go through the same pain that I'm suffering

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