Welcome to the Google Summer of Code!

[Dave <sn...@gmail.com>]

As you may know, I submitted a set of project ideas [1] for the Google
Summer of Code [2] on behalf of the Apache Roller project. We received
a couple dozen great proposals and one of them was good enough to make
it through the tough competition for one of the Apache Software
Foundation's 31 project slots [3].

Congratulations to Tatyana Tokareva who wrote the winning proposal for
"Open ID support for Roller blog server." Here's the abstract:

Title : Open ID support for Roller blog server [4]
Student : Tatyana Tokareva
Mentor : Dave Johnson

Abstract

It's quite evident that the number of online user accounts increases
rapidly. It's almost impossible to remember logins and passwords on
each website, and that's why systems that use authentication servers
have valuable priority. As far as the Roller blog server is an
application which provides access to different blog sites, and all of
them require authorization, it can be very useful to reduce the amount
of logins at different services to minimum.

The main aim of the project is to increase the efficiency of the
authentication and authorization processes at the Roller blog server
by managing logon to several services and users' identity in one place
via an authentication server with OpenID technology. Using this
technology, we'll achieve cross-application and cross-domain single
sign-on (SSO). As a result, the users will be more satisfied as they
won't have to remember logins and passwords from every website, and
just use single OpenID identifier. And the number of people using
Roller blog will increase.

With the fulfillment of the objectives previously exposed, the
community will see beneficiary in the following aspects:

1. Support single logon for user accounts and for users who leave blog comments;
2. Existing users will be able to tie their accounts to the OpenID
identity for further use;
3. New users will have to provide only OpenID identity for further
identification;
4. If the user is not logged-in and wants to leave a comment, the
system will redirect him to the login page;
5. Integration of the new authorization system to the existing one,
which is built on Spring Acegi framework;
6. Support for multiple profiles (for example, provide different names
and info at different services).


I'm really looking forward to mentoring this very cool new project.
Like all Roller development, the project discussions and decisions
will be made right here on the Roller dev mailing list and will use
the Roller wiki for all new feature proposal(s).

And Tatyana: Welcome to the Roller community!

- Dave


[1] Roller GSoC project ides
http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/google_summer_of_code_ideas

[2] Google Summer of Code
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

[3] ASF's 31 projects
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/asf/about.html

[4] Tatyana's abstract
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/asf/appinfo.html?csaid=BB31F1FCC3C5D7A