[Tilecache] Tilecache Authentication

[Attila Csipa]

On Thursday 17 January 2008 13:29:38 Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> (And this is far more than I expected you would get out of me, but
> squeak enough and I guess you still get the grease.)

lol

> The reason that this isn't *built in* to TileCache is clear to me: it's
> too site specific. Everyone will want a different way of doing it. Some

This is mostly what I meant by saying "unless you are doing the whole HTTP 
authentication process within tilecache, which I would advise against." :)

> For cases where you have more complex needs, you'll need a more complex
> solution. 

What I think would make sense is to step away from the gritty details of 
authentication and think about this from a system perspective. Is tilecache a 
really fundamentally separate service ? Not really - it's a _cache_ as the 
name suggests. So to do auth exclusively on the level of tilecache makes my 
engineer-sense tingle. What I would rather lean to (again, just 
metaphysically speaking, without getting into implementation details), is to 
think about a mechanism that relays any necessary auth information to the 
data source tilecache is using. If that source cannot provide any 
authentication/access management, tilecache itself would be the wrong place 
to put such barriers in, IMH(E)O. Comments welcome.