Re: [phplib] default authentication, anyone using it? From: Kristian Koehntopp (kris <email protected>)
Date: 08/05/01

In netuse.lists.phplib you write:
>But What do you think of taking away altogether the 'user' storage for
>nobody? That leads to quite a few programming mistakes, and extra checks
>to be done whenever you register or freeze or page_close.

'User'data was a hack. It was implemented because it was
possible and is more like a design study. The implementation is
bad, it is being done by nullifying existing methods inherited
from Session instead of defining an abstract superclass and
deriving User and Session from it.

The jury is still out on the case regarding userdata at all.
There are strong arguments for seeing userdata as structured
data, which should be kept in a proper preferences table with
one column for each preferences item. This would allow for
vertical queries (list all users that have enabled the
x-feature) and statistics (how popular is the Jon Katz slashbox
with our user population?). On the other hand userdata is easier
to abstract into a library than a structured preferences table,
and one is able to handle userdata without planning the layout
and structure of a table.

Im my personal opinion User should be replaced by a class that
is not derived from Session or any Session superclass. It should
not use the Session storage mechanism. There should be a User
class that uses a structured table for preferences, and that
allows horizontal and vertical queries, and a User subclass for
nobody users, which transparently hides the fact that for
nobodies the User data is being kept in a reserved session
variable.

This would automatically exclude nobodies and their preferences
from vertical queries, which is the right thing to do.

Kristian 

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