I am building a web application on Google App Engine that requires users to register with the application and subsequently authenticate with it and maintain sessions. I don’t want to force users to have Google accounts. Also, the target audience for the application is the average non-geek, so I’m not very keen on using OpenID or OAuth. I need something simple like: User registers with an e-mail and password, and then can log back in with those credentials. I understand that this approach does not provide the security benefits of Google or OpenID authentication, but I am prepared to trade foolproof security for end-user convenience and hassle-free experience.
I explored Django, but decided that consecutive deprecations from appengine-helper to app-engine-patch to django-nonrel may signal that path may be a bit risky in the long-term. I’d like to use a code base that is likely to be maintained consistently. I also explored standalone session/auth packages like gaeutilities and suas. GAEUtilities looked a bit immature (e.g., the code wasn’t pythonic in places, in my opinion) and SUAS did not give me a lot of comfort with the cookie-only sessions. I could be wrong with my assessment of these two, so I would appreciate input on those (or others that may serve my objective).
Finally, I recently came across tipfy. It appears to be based on Werkzeug and Alex Martelli spoke highly of it here on stackoverflow. I have two primary questions related to tipfy:
- As a framework, is it as mature as webapp? Is it stable and likely to be maintained for some time?
- Since my primary interest is the auth/session components, can those components of the tipfy framework be used with webapp, independent of the broader tipfy framework? If yes, I would appreciate a few pointers to how I could go about doing that.
http://www.tipfy.org/wiki/tutorials/auth/
Of note, apparently tipfy can be used off GAE as well although that’s not the developers’ focus.