The Butt Ugly Weblog

JSPWiki auth suspended

The current AAA system in the CVS version has been suspended. There will be no more development on it. (And I feel a big relief saying this, as if a weight had left my shoulders.)

This is due to several reasons:

• I have been unable to do any other work on any other part than the AAA system, as I always get the nagging feeling that I should really work on the whole AAA thing.
• I really don't like writing AAA. It's a damned complicated system which has dependencies and it touches areas that I don't just understand enough about. I also have a personal feeling that per-page permissions are NOT very useful - at least they are useful to me. They run against the Wiki philosophy, and while I understand that a bunch of people do find them useful, it's really hard to be motivated to do something you don't believe in.
• The design of the AAA system was faulty from the get-go. This unfortunately meant that it became a bug-infested beast even before it was properly born. I screwed up, and I just don't have the skills to fix it properly: I would just screw it up again.
• I have little time these days, and it is frankly, better used on things that I find interesting and useful.

With all this, the development of JSPWiki has been slowed down too much. I was hoping to release 2.2 about a year ago, and I haven't been able to release even a single beta. This simply sucks. You may have noticed a flurry of updates in the recent few weeks in the CVS, and this is all due to the fact that I decided to give up on the AAA system and concentrate on the rest of the code base. I have so many ideas and things that I personally need and want that it simply does not make sense for me to keep developing a feature that is simply not interesting. (I'm planning things such as making JSPWiki Lifeblog compatible, providing proper diff and ~AtomAPI support, easier installation, speed optimizations, etc.)

However, all is not lost. Andrew Jaquith has promised to take over the AAA system development, and rewrite the whole thing from scratch. He is progressing nicely, but it is likely not to make in the 2.2 release. If you want to help, please join the mailing list and engage in the discussion there.

Until then, the current AAA system in the CVS will exist, but bugs are not fixed, and no further development is done. It won't be removed, but it'll not be enabled by default.