Development Blog: Viget Labs

A little over a year ago, the open_id_authentication plugin for Rails made its debut, intending to make OpenID authentication simple. And it did, for a while. But, like Rails itself, OpenID is a moving target and the OpenID specification, as well as the ruby-openid library, have both moved on to version 2.0 since then. The API changed enough that the plugin wouldn’t work with the newer library, effectively leaving applications that use it in the OpenID 1.0 world.

This all changed last Thursday. After much deliberation, a new version of open_id_authentication has landed, with support for ruby-openid 2.0.x, and OpenID 2.0 along with it. The upgrade process is pretty painless; a few database tables need attention (the new plugin will generate a migration to take care of those) and you’ll need to tweak any mocks you’re using in your tests/specs (you are using mocks, right?) It took me about half an hour last night. If you’re doing OpenID in your application, or if you think you want to, now’s a great time to take another look at this plugin.