I recently had the opportunity to investigate LDAP authentication and particularly SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) binding with DIGEST-MD5 (“SASL/DIGEST-MD5”), because this approach provides network communication security with little sever configuration. Currently, there are two popular LDAP gems ruby-ldap and ruby-net-ldap that provide API for simple binding on plain or SSL connections; however, in my test, both gems failed to create SASL/DIGEST-MD5 binding correctly.
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The web application landscape has changed drastically in the past year or two. Where once every site was a silo unto itself and could reasonably expect users to create a unique login and password for each site, it is now a different story. I sigh every time I have to fill out yet another registration form, wishing instead for a simple "Connect with Facebook", "Sign in with Twitter", or "Log in with OpenID". At the same time, services are more interconnected than ever. One of the best ways to increase the popularity and viability of a new service is by piggybacking it onto the existing user bases of apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare.
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