[Phpsmacl-development] Development Progress

[Martin A. \El H. Gris\ <mal...@gm...>]

It's been a busy week for the development of SMACL. The distributed 
system seems to be working fine, but still it hasn't been implemented on 
the ACL object. This object interacts with an ACL table representation 
and is the most complex of all the objects in the SMACL API. That is one 
of the reason why the distribution of this object is being delayed. The 
other reason is that there was a new feature being implemented that 
modified the ACL and ACLCheck, therefore the distributed ACL would need 
to be updated after the implementation of this feature. To avoid this we 
just delayed the creation of the distributed ACL.

This new feature in the ACL and ACLCheck provides a new method for 
checking permissions. This method requires a ACO, an ARO, and an 
AXOGroup type, and returns all the AXO where the ACO has been allowed to 
the ARO. For example, if you have a forum you may want to check all the 
forums the user have access to, with these methos you can obtain this in 
one query.

This new check method reduces the efficiency costs as it spends almost 
the same time than a normal check. Using  the normal check to obtain the 
same results, you have to multiply this time by the amount of resources. 
Considering that a PHP script is restricted to a very small amount of 
time to complete, this is a great improvement in efficiency costs.

Also, the ACL implementation on a generic MySQL implementation had a 
problem in one of the SQL queries, which made the ACL check algorithm 
run inneficciently. This has been solved by spliting the SQL query with 
the problem in two queries, as MySQL did not respond as expected when 
using only one query (it was doing a full scan of the acl table when it 
shouldn't).

Furthermore, a new mechanism of error triggering and handling is being 
implemented. This will provide better means to capture an error 
generated inside the library.

That's all for now.
We're very close to an alpha release.