The future of Authlogic: add ons

It’s funny to say this, because Authlogic has only been out for about 4 months, but I feel like it’s a pretty solid, lean, and mature library. I feel this way because of the community around Authlogic. At lot of people have contributed bug fixes, feature additions, performance enhancements, etc. It’s been a really fun experience and shown me first hand how great open source can be on the other side of the fence.

That being said, feature-wise, it’s starting to plateau. At this stage it is tempting to start adding extraneous features that bloat the library. Obviously, no one likes a big bloated, complicated library, so I’ve been pretty picky with the features added. There is a very fine line that separates features that belong in an optional module and features that belong in the core that are toggled via a configuration option. Instead of slowing the growth of Authlogic by being Mr. anti-bloat, it would make more sense to provide a venue for extension, otherwise called a public API. I know that’s a pretty fundamental idea, but that’s what this post is all about. The last few releases of Authlogic have focused hard on the public API. Authlogic uses it’s own API internally and I have also used it in a few projects of mine. It has worked out great. So far, I have not encountered any limitations and I am confident it’s ready for prime time.

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