en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/17/064bb12bad0eaf3c1d53a99114cfa7a1.html 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]]> Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:36:58 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/17/064bb12bad0eaf3c1d53a99114cfa7a1.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/26/03a68b363d18784fbdf4ffcdae862b9b.html
For developers, I hope to put together a quick and dirty tutorial on how to implement OpenID using the JanRain library for PHP. It's really not that hard once you get used to a few routines and things here and there just to get a rudimentary authentication piece going. I haven't implemented the server piece where you can give out your own OpenID. But since places like Yahoo, M$ and Google are supporting OpenID, I think it might be simpler just to let the Big Boys handle that for now.]]> Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:33:29 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/26/03a68b363d18784fbdf4ffcdae862b9b.html