Rails Plugins

Alleged Entertainment has written several Ruby on Rails plugins to support web applications such as Journey and ProCon.

Plugins

Authentication

ae_users was Alleged Entertainment’s full-featured user authentication and authorization system built using Rails Engines. It was used in Journey, ProCon, Vellum, and Ponzi. ae_users is designed around the concept of using a shared database to allow multiple web apps to use the same set of authentication data.

Although ae_users more or less works as designed, its problems have been myriad. For one thing, it requires all apps to have access to the same database server, which makes hosting on Heroku or similar platforms difficult. Additionally, ActiveRecord is (quite reasonably) unhappy about having models in different databases that have associations with one another.

For these reasons, Nat has been developing a replacement solution. The new central authentication source will be an application called Illyan, which acts as a CAS server. Other applications can authenticate against Illyan using any CAS client, but Nat has written devise_cas_authenticatable for this purpose, which allows client apps to use the Devise authentication system. Authorization is up to the individual app, and can be done using whatever authorization system you like (Nat likes CanCan).

Other Rails plugins

  • ae_forms – a simple form builder that uses a tableless, CSS-based layout
  • jipe – Jester In Place Editing controls (replacements for the Rails in-place editors using the Jester library)

Getting the plugins

The plugins are hosted on Github:

  • devise_cas_authenticatable – http://github.com/nbudin/devise_cas_authenticatable
  • devise_openid_authenticatable – http://github.com/nbudin/devise_openid_authenticatable
  • illyan – http://github.com/nbudin/illyan
  • ae_users_migrator – http://github.com/nbudin/ae_users_migrator (helps legacy ae_users apps migrate to something more modern)
  • ae_forms – http://github.com/nbudin/ae_forms
  • jipe – http://github.com/nbudin/jipe
  • ae_users – http://github.com/nbudin/ae_users

License

The AE Rails Plugins are copyrighted by Nat Budin. The author releases this software under the MIT License.