Spectaclar: Authorization first

More on Spectaclar. Haven’t done much today on the site, as I’ve been working on Mediawiki and riding my bike and enjoying being a slacker.

There’s a blurb that I just added to the site that’s probably worth blogging.

The primary focus for this site, at the time of this writing, is authorization, as opposed to authentication or accounting. I plan to go with the flow, so if there ends up being a bunch of interest in authentication or accounting, I’m not going to fight it, but it’s not where I plan to spend the bulk of my time. There are a lot of folks (Liberty Alliance, OpenID) thinking about authentication and identity issues, so I’m hoping for a little division of labor.

Both authentication and authorization are big problems. The funny thing is there seem to be more solutions for authentication than authorization, probably because authentication is the first “A” in “AAA”. They tend to run out of steam by the time they get to authorization, which is why I want to start there.

However, it’s not as though there’s a specific piece of software that we’re writing here yet, and it’s not as though the “authentication” community and the “authorization” communities are entirely disjoint. We’ll see which way it really swings after a while (if it does anything at all).