My Diversions

This site has potential to be quite interesting, depending on the quality of the instructions.

It may also self select an interesting group of people — I wonder what a version of Slashdot which only those people knew about would be like?

The launch of Google’s AppEngine has given me the obligation to find out what it’s all about, and the opportunity to learn a bit more about one of our products, Crowd — and, of course, pick up some Python along the way.

I began by working through Google’s Guestbook example, and then replaced its use of Google’s Users API with single sign on via Crowd.

Crowd Single Sign On

A Crowd client application authenticates via SOAP calls to a Crowd server. The sequence looks like this:

Duck Punching httplib for SOAP

I used the soaplib Python SOAP library to talk to Crowd. This library uses httplib to talk to the SOAP server, which is a problem as AppEngine only allows applications to use Google’s HTTP request mechanism.

I adapted soaplib to use Google’s fetch function by ‘Duck Punching’, also known as ‘Monkey Patching’. This globally overrides a library class with a class of your own:

import httplib

class AppEngineHTTPConnection(object):
... delegate the functions called by soaplib to Google's fetch ...

class Crowd(object):
def __init__(self, path, applicationName, applicationPassword):
    # do some monkeypatching
    httplib.HTTPConnection = AppEngineHTTPConnection

Simple, and safe in this case, as we want any client of httplib to use our replacement.

By default, soaplib puts an empty namespace on strings and arrays, so I cut, pasted and renamed these classes, changing them to explicitly set the correct namespace. A Pythonista could probably duck-punch their way out of that with less duplication

My modified Guestbook application adds login and logout URLs which authenticate with Crowd and create the appropriate cookie.

Caveats and Conclusions

AppEngine doesn’t support SSL, so your username and password are transmitted unencrypted to the application. To avoid this you could write a small authentication application to be hosted with your Crowd server under SSL.

Your Crowd server and your Google AppEngine application need to be on the same domain, in order to share the Crowd SSO cookie. This should be possible by assigning your domain to a Google Apps account, but I haven’t managed to add my Google Apps domain to my Google AppEngine application yet.

Python

I strongly dislike weakly typed languages such as Python. IDEs can’t sensibly provide code completion, and I found that I made many errors which were only caught at runtime. Most of these were in code which could easily have been type checked at compile time.

The sooner type inference is added to Python or AppEngine supports JVM languages, the happier I’ll be. I expect the latter to happen first.

Code

The code for this AppEngine app can be found in my crowd-appengine Git repository. As usual, get a snapshot if you don’t have a git client installed.