OAuth, Crowd and OpenID authentication

[kenhtanaka]

Can oXygen support OAuth, Crowd or OpenID authentication? Scanning through the forums, Google, and oXygen help indicates this isn't available yet.

Is there much interest other authentication features? I suggest adding OAuth, and maybe Crowd and OpenID, support to oXygen. OAuth is one of the more common ways to provide machine-to-machine authentication.

I'm one of the developers of an XML repository service for scientific metadata at NOAA (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov). We would like to make it easy to connect to oXygen as an editor via the "File -> Open URL..." dialog. Currently we don't support WebDAV, which is one of the authenticated access mechanisms in oXygen. We could add WebDAV support, but I think oXygen would be the only client needing it. We will be adding OAuth support since that has been identified as one of the best methods for programs to load XML into our database. We currently have thousands of XML records, so we are using the XML capabilities of an Oracle DB for searching and XSLT transforms with Grails as the interactive interface, which is why we aren't using a file based system amenable to (S)FTP/SVN directly. (There are hundreds of thousands of existing records that are good candiates to add to our system in the future.)

At the moment we have Atlassian Crowd implemented for interactive user logins, but I imagine this isn't as popular since the authentication server is not free software. If other users of oXygen have an interest in Crowd, then that would be a good protocol to support too.

As for OpenID, it would be nice to allow users the access to XML documents with the "Login with Facebook/Google/Yahoo/etc..." that is becoming widely used by many websites. NOAA has contracted Google to provide email and calendaring support, so within the organization, OpenID would be a nice to have option since users are likely to be already logged in to Google for their work email during the day. However, OAuth would be more universally applicable to provide access to users both inside and outside our organization. OAuth is also better suited to automated data transfers.

Ken Tanaka
Software developer, http://cires.colorado.edu/
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/

[adrian]

Hello,

Thank you for the feedback.

Currently(v13.2) Oxygen does not support any of these authentication methods.
I have logged your request to our issue tracking tool and it will be analyzed and if found appropriate it will be implemented in a future version of Oxygen.

Regards,
Adrian