Alex Little

Earlier, Marc posted a story on KMi planet about the 7 opens in MSG, well, I’ve started to make that 8 as I’ve finally got round to spending a bit of time looking at OpenID.

I’d spent a little bit of time last week looking at the draft of the OpenID book, which explained all the processes well of how it all works, but I struggled a little with the actual example in chapter 5 (or was it 6?!) – following how the URLs & packets matched the workflow previously explained.

This evening, I installed the JanRain PHP OpenID library on my laptop, so I now have a (dummy) OpenID identity provider and consumer up and running on my laptop. The instructions were for setting up on *nix server, but runs fine (with few tweaks to the instructions) on Windows (XP with PHP5) too. What I’ve done is all pretty basic, and probably quite insecure as I’m not using SSL or a ‘proper’ random number generator – but will be good enough for playing with. I hope to be able to rewrite the server part into Java/JSP as that’s what we’re going to be running it on. Although it may seem a little odd just rewriting (esp. when Java libraries already exist for OpenID) but my thinking is that doing it myself should help a lot in my actual understanding of how it all works… possibly!