[OpenID] OpenID PHP5 Zend Framework Library

[Jonathan Daugherty]

# The Zend Framework is a PHP5 application framework sponsored by Zend
# (that PHP company). As they are nearing a beta release for March, I
# have started formal proposal to implement native OpenID support
# within the framework. The initial proposal to kickstart the process
# is a new Zend_Service_Yadis component.

This is great to hear.

# Also the ZF is PHP5 specific, meaning many of the current PHP-OpenID
# libraries classes would need to be added to and expanded regardless
# (e.g. Sockets based HTTP client, PDO, SimpleXML parser).

FWIW, there is already a sockets-based HTTP client in our library (the
Janrain library).  I don't know about SimpleXML, but DOM is the de
facto XML extension for PHP 5 as far as I know, and our library
already supports that.  And as for PDO, well, we can add support for
that.  (To date, nobody has requested it, however.)

# I'd just like to note this separate PHP project is primarily for
# Zend Framework integration and is not the result of any disagreement
# or criticism of that library - it's purely an exercise to bring
# OpenID into a pure PHP5 flavour in agreement with the Framework's
# stated goals.

Thanks for pointing that out.  Can you provide a list of stated goals
that you're moving toward?  We want to know if we can make changes to
the existing library to make it more compatible with your framework.
(Obviously, PHP-5-only code isn't really an option, as we have to
support a larger user base, and PHP 4 is by a very large margin the
most widely-deployed major version of PHP.)

In summary, it's *great* that you're picking up OpenID and integrating
it into a framework.  However, I'm a bit skeptical about the decision
to write another Yadis implementation (and, later, an OpenID
implementation).  These things are non-trival and error-prone.  I
would rather work with you to see if there are ways to bring the
Janrain library into better conformance with your framework; then, you
can forget about the job of making OpenID work, and move on with using
OpenID in your applications.

Thanks and good luck,

-- 
  Jonathan Daugherty
  JanRain, Inc.
  irc.freenode.net: cygnus in #openid
  cygnus.myopenid.com