BooRah - Inside the Buzz

OpenID has come a long way since it’s inception a year and a half ago. It’s usage has gone mainstream, & open source libraries are available to help companies enable their own sites for OpenID. With BooRah’s growing user-base and multiple partners we’re integrating with, there is no better time to support this open standard on our site. So, you can now login to BooRah with your OpenID and start experiencing seamless integration with some of our partners (others to come).

It’s easy. Just enter your OpenID and we’ll take it from there. If you have setup your OpenID profile with your name, e-mail address, and/or nickname, BooRah will attempt to fetch that information automatically. And, if you are already a BooRah member, we’ll associate your OpenID with your BooRah account.

Geek alert - Non OpenID fans may find the following piece a bit dry.

We also see OpenID as a great B2B integration mechanism. Instead of building custom integration modules to share profile information with our partners, we leverage OpenID’s SimpleRegistration extension to transmit profile information securely to our partners. For instance, when you make a reservation on boorah.com through our partner BookingAngel (see Tied House in Mountain View), we seamlessly create a BooRah OpenID login for you (unless you signed in to BooRah with your own OpenID) and transmit ONLY this URI to our partner. Our partner then simply uses the established OpenID protocol to retrieve your profile information; with your permission, of course!

We use an open-source Java library named JOID (Get code here) to drive both the BooRah relying party and the BooRah provider components. We had to make a few tweaks to the code in order for it work with our User object and permissions system; but, it was a breeze to get it up & running. If your company is looking to use OpenID for user-login and/or integration and you have any questions on technology or implementation, drop me a line in the comments section here and I’ll try my best to answer.

Go OpenID!

Tags: joid, openid

This entry was posted by Shrisha Radhakrishna on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under BooRah, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.