Nearly there

The idea behind OpenID sounds great. Create one account and re-use that account wherever you need to log in on the Web. Excellent idea, and very enticing because the system is completely decentralised and relies on basic Web technologies. Using Web tech is a great plus when you think about how tedious it can be inside an organisation to get access to an LDAP server because of firewall and external user policies and such.

Combine OpenID with FOAF and you get a completely decentralised social networking platform. Good stuff.

While I like the idea, the implementation side is still sketchy. There are two Java implementations: openid4java which requires you to include more than a dozen jars to be able to simply provide a login; the source archive has a whopping 74M, so I didn’t touch it. Luckily there’s joid, which is much smaller.

So joid is the jar of choice. Joid works fine with myopenid.com and verisign ids (it’s from the Verisign guys after all), but fails on livejournal ids. And, more annoyingly, the library doesn’t seem to support delegated ids. As the mailing list moderator is apparently dead, it means to wait another year or two until the kinks are ironed out.

I like being an early adopter. Really.