[Twisted-Python] Guard

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Sunday, July 20, 2003, at 03:39 PM, Moshe Zadka wrote:

> As many of you know, using guard (the webby interface to 
> authentication)
> has been a thorny issue with Twisted. Christopher Armstrong and I wrote
> a module which hides many of the details of using guard, and supplies
> a much more usable interface.

For the record, I think this code is awful, and I am sad that my lack 
of time for documentation has made something like this necessary.

What simpleguard lets you avoid is writing a domain abstraction outside 
of your web code.  While this may seem attractive, it is a parlor trick 
to reduce linecount in trivialized examples, not a sensible way to 
architect an application or even a middling-small site.

I would urge all Twisted users to please avoid simpleguard, as I would 
like to remove it in a future release of Twisted.  Paul Swartz and I 
are working on more detailed documentation of newcred, but until then 
there are the mailing list messages last month in the thread "lies, 
damn lies, and stable interfaces" to which I humbly refer you all.

However, if the community concensus is really that our users want 
something like this I won't take it out.  I will just think it's a pity 
that HTTP has come to dominate networked application architecture so 
universally.