The Rails 3.1 Release Candidate announcement contained news of many new and useful features, plus these regretful words: has_secure_password: Dead-simple BCrypt-based passwords. Now there’s no excuse not to roll your own authentication scheme. I will briefly provide an excuse. "Simple BCrypt-based passwords" is a reasonable feature, but shouldn't be mistaken for end-to-end authentication, or even a substantial subset of that problem. Web site authentication in the real world is a far harder...

"Delphi Labs" is proud to announce the immediate availability of the new episode in the "DataSnap XE" serie: "Authentication and Authorization"! This work was scheduled for last week, but I hope to be back on track and just starting to work on the this week's episode on DataSnap filters. The most challenging thing this week was to invent a possibly the most simple scenario of role-based security for a DataSnap server. I have end up with just implementing a basic authentication rule, that only...