Friday, 30 March 2007

Progress Update on Zend_Service_Yadis

In a new post over his blog, Pбdraic Brady explains that Yadis is a specification, which describes a protocol for retrieving Service information valid for a specific ID. He says the simplest example is figuring out from a user's OpenID where you should fire off authentication requests. In OpenID, Yadis can be used to grab a user's XRDS document, an XML list of services, which should provide the URL and service types of the user's OpenID Provider, Pбdraic explained.

Back in late February, he submitted a proposal to the Zend Framework wiki to see if Zend_Service_Yadiscould be added as part of an overall objective to natively support OpenID (and related technologies) within the framework. Yadis is a suitable standalone service since it's not OpenID specific and is therefore useful for a number of other purposes. That proposal has seen a few revisions since the initial draft so I'm hoping that by the time Zend Framework 1.0 is released it's in good enough shape to allow for a review and critique, he added.

The component will not support using Internationalised Resource Indicators (IRIs) since the Zend Framework cannot validate them. This is rather difficult considering each national registrar has varying character restrictions within IRIs, and that IRIs would need to be mapped (punycode) to a matching URI before use. Support for XRIs will be supported, but may not initially be concrete. To be honest I find the concept of the XRI unintuitive, they don't seen to offer any compelling advantages over the URI, and it's not like browsers support them. Still, what the Yadis and OpenID specs declare is what I need to implement, he stated.

For those out there curious about implementing OpenID, or Yadis, your feedback and comments would be welcome, he concluded.