How to hire the best engineers – part 2
In my previous blog post, I came to the conclusion that
If you’re a hiring manager with a 100 candidates, just interview a sample pool of 7 candidates, choose the best and then interview the rest one at a time until you reach one that better than the best in the sample pool. You will have 90% chance of choosing someone in the top 25% of those 100 candidates.
I mentioned that there are 2 worst case scenarios for this hiring strategy. Firstly, if coincidentally we selected the 7 worst candidates out of 100, then the next one we choose will be taken regardless how good or bad it is. Secondly, if the best candidate is already in the sample pool, then we’ll be going through the rest of the population without finding the best. Let’s talk about these scenarios now.
The first is easily resolved. The probabilities are already considered and calculated in our simulation so we don’t need to worry about that any more. The second is a bit tricky. To find out the failure probability, we tweak the simulation a bit again. This time round instead of getting every sample pool size, we focus on the best results i.e. sample pool size of 7.
require 'rubygems'
require 'faster_csv'
population_size = 100
sample_size = 0..population_size-1
iteration_size = 100000
top = (population_size-25)..(population_size-1)
size = 7
population = []
frequencies = []
iteration_size.times do |iteration|
population = (0..population_size-1).to_a.sort_by {rand}
sample = population.slice(0..size-1)
rest_of_population = population[size..population_size-1]
best_sample = sample.sort.last
rest_of_population.each_with_index do |p, i|
if p > best_sample
frequencies << i
break
end
end
end
puts "Success probability : #{frequencies.size.to_f*100.0/iteration_size.to_f}%"
Notice we’re essentially counting the times we succeed over the iterations we made. The result for this is a success probability of 93%!
Let’s look at some basic laws of probability now. Let’s say A is the event that the strategy works (the sample pool does not contain the best candidate), so the probability of A is P(A) and this value is 0.93. Let’s say B is the event that the the candidate we find out if this strategy is within the best quartile(regardless if A succeeds or not), so the probability of B is P(B). We don’t know the value of P(B) and we can’t really find P(B) since A and B are not independent. What we really want is . What we do know however is P(B|A) which is the probability of B given A happens. This value is 0.9063 (from the previous post),
Using the rule of multiplication:
We get the answer:
which is 84.3% probability that the sample pool does not contain the best candidate and we get the top quartile of the total candidate population.
Next, we want to find out, given that we have a high probability of getting the correct candidates in, how many candidates will we have to interview before we find one that is better than the best in the sample pool? Naturally if we have to interview a lot of candidates before finding one, the strategy isn’t practical. Let’s tweak the simulation again, this time to count the successful ones and get a histogram of the number of interviews before we hit jackpot.
What kind of histogram do you think we will get? An initial thought was that it would be a normal distribution, which is not great news for this strategy, because a histogram peaks around the mean, which means the number of candidates we need to interview is around 40+.
require 'rubygems'
require 'faster_csv'
population_size = 100
sample_size = 0..population_size-1
iteration_size = 100000
top = (population_size-25)..(population_size-1)
size = 7
population = []
frequencies = []
iteration_size.times do |iteration|
population = (0..population_size-1).to_a.sort_by {rand}
sample = population.slice(0..size-1)
rest_of_population = population[size..population_size-1]
best_sample = sample.sort.last
rest_of_population.each_with_index do |p, i|
if p > best_sample
frequencies << i
break
end
end
end
FasterCSV.open('optimal_duration.csv', 'w') do |csv|
rest_of_population = population[size..population_size-1]
rest_of_population.size.times do |i|
count_array = frequencies.find_all{|f| f == i}
csv << [i+1, count_array.size.to_f/frequencies.size.to_f]
end
end
The output is a CSV file called optimal_duration.csv. Charting the data as a histogram, surprisingly we get power law graph like this:
This is good news for or strategy! Looking at our dataset, the probability of the first candidate in the rest of the candidate population to be the one is 13.58% while the probability of getting our man (or woman) in the first 10 candidates we interview is a whopping 63.25%!
So have we nailed the question if the strategy is good one? No, there is still one last question unanswered and this is the breaker. Stay tuned for part 3! (For those who are reading this, an exercise — tell me what you think is the breaker question?)
Umbrellas to work, or why engineers should get married
When I was working in Yahoo at Suntec City, I used to take the MRT to work every day and my route is completely sheltered right to the doorsteps of the office so the weather didn’t really have much effect on me. I still take the MRT to the office now that I am at Garena, but there is a short distance from the MRT station to the office, about 5 minutes of walking, where it is subject to the elements.
Now I don’t take any umbrellas along with me, so with the recent change in weather (it has been raining cats and dogs and all sorts of mammals in between) I have been caught a few times in some unpleasant wetness. It is during one of these wet commutes from home to office I was thinking of ways of making sure that will not happen again.
The idea was like this. I will place some umbrellas at the office and also at home. Whenever I leave the house or the office and if it is raining, I will take the umbrella to the office or back home respectively. Naturally if it’s not raining then I wouldn’t want to look like a dork and carry one.
Therein lies the problem. Let’s say I keep 1 umbrella at the office and another at home. If it rains when I’m leaving the office, I will carry that one home, leaving 2 at home and none at the office. If it rains the next day when I leave home it’s ok, I will just take an umbrella to the office, making it 1 – 1 again. If it doesn’t rain and therefore I don’t take any umbrellas to the office, I will be left with 2 – 0. If it happens to rain when I’m leaving the office I’m stuck with getting wet again.
What if I have 2 umbrellas at the office and 2 at home? In this case I will be caught wet only if the same occurrence (rain when leaving the office followed by no rain when leaving the house) happens 2 days in a row, which probability is lower than if it happens just once. Still, that can happen and I want to get assurance that the risk of getting wet is really minimal. In that case, the question becomes, how many umbrellas should I leave at the office and similarly at home such that the probability of getting wet is negligible? Note that it doesn’t really matter if one place has more umbrellas than the other since it will be the same as the lower number of umbrellas in the long run.
To find out, I used a popular (and really pragmatic and therefore very ‘engineering’) method of finding probabilities — the Monte Carlo simulation method. The name sounds fancy but it’s really just an algorithm that uses repeated random samples to find the answer. In our case, what we want to do is to find out, over large sample, the average number of trips I will make before I run the risk of getting wet.
To find this, I will need to inspect the probability that it will rain at any given day. For easy of calculations, I use a probability between 1% chance that it will rain and 99% chance that it will rain. Why don’t I include 0% or 100%? This is because if it is 0% it means it will never rain and so I will never need to use an umbrella, and if it 100% it will always rain and therefore I will always bring an umbrella back or forth.
On top of that, I will run the simulation for the case where I have 2 umbrellas at home and at the office, up to 50 umbrellas at home and at the office. To give a large enough representation, I run this over 1000 iterations (more will be better but it will take too long to run). This is the Ruby code for the simulation.
require 'rubygems'
require 'faster_csv'
umbrellas_range = 2..50
probability_range = 1..99
@location = :home
total_trips = {}
iterations = 1000
def walks_to(loc)
location = loc
@num_of_trips += 1
end
def office?() @location == :office; end
def home?() @location == :home; end
def raining?(probability) rand(99) < probability; end
FasterCSV.open('umbrellas.csv', 'w') do |csv|
csv << [''] + probability_range.to_a
umbrellas_range.each do |umbrellas|
probability_range.each do |probability|
total_trips[probability] = 0
iterations.times do
@num_of_trips = 0
wet = false
home = umbrellas
office = umbrellas
while not wet
if home?
walks_to :office
if raining?(probability)
if home > 0
home -= 1
office += 1
else
wet = true
end
end
elsif office?
walks_to :home
if raining?(probability)
if office > 0
office -= 1
home += 1
else
wet = true
end
end
end
end
total_trips[probability] += @num_of_trips
end
end
row = [umbrellas]
total_trips.sort.each { |pair| row << pair[1]/iterations }
csv << row
end
end
The Ruby program writes to a simple CSV file called umbrellas.csv with the first row being the probability, and the first column the number of umbrellas at each location. If you chart each row with the y-axis being the number of trips and the x-axis being the probability of rain from 1% to 99%, you will find a chart like this:
Now that I have the average number of trips that I will make before I get wet, I want to actually see what that means for Singapore. To do this, I went to the National Environment Agency’s website and dug out the weather statistics for Singapore. There is a statistic that gives the average number of rainy days in any given month for the past 118 years. I take that for each month and divide that with the number of days in that month to derive the monthly probability of rain as in the following table:
| Month | Probability of rain |
| January | 48% |
| February | 39% |
| March | 45% |
| April | 50% |
| May | 45% |
| June | 43% |
| July | 42% |
| August | 45% |
| September | 47% |
| October | 52% |
| November | 63% |
| December | 61% |
Finally I match that with the Monte Carlo simulation I made earlier. The average number of trips for each month, must be between 56 to 62 days (each trip is one way only, so every day is 2 trips). For example, the statistics shows that the wettest months are in November and December which is 63% and 61% probability of rain respectively. This means I will need to have 38 umbrellas at each location for each of these 2 months (please check your umbrellas.csv file; open it up with Excel). In February where the 
probability of rain is the lowest (39%), I will only need 23 umbrellas at each location to almost guarantee that I will not get wet (the whole deal assumes at the end of each month, I replenish each location with the necessary number of umbrellas, of course).
That evening when I proudly told my wife my findings at home, she stared at me for while (frostily if I might add) then gave me a small folding umbrella, which I now carry in my laptop bag.
And that is the reason why engineers should get married.
(I have been inspired by this book — Digital Dice : Computational Solutions to Practical Probability Problems, by Paul J. Nahin)
Clone TinyURL with 40 lines of Ruby code on Google AppEngine for Java
Amidst the wretched events that happened at work recently, I forgot about an interesting development in running apps on a cloud. Google AppEngine finally released Java support on the AppEngine platform. For those uninitiated, AppEngine is Google’s cloud computing platform that allows developers to serve up applications on Google’s infrastructure. When it was first released in April 2008, the only language supported was Python. Python is a great language but doesn’t appeal to my inner Rubyist so it didn’t catch my attention. Until now that is.
While Java is no longer my language of choice nowadays, Ruby actually runs pretty well under JRuby with Java. And with the addition of the Java support for AppEngine, it became a lot more interesting. A few weeks back I wrote Snip, a TinyURL clone, in about 40 lines of Ruby code, and deployed it on Heroku. It seems like a good idea to take Snip out for a spin on the Google AppEngine for Java (GAE/J).
The first thing you need to do is to create an application on the GAE/J. Start by going to this URL – http://appengine.google.com/start and log in using a Google account. After logging in, create a new application following the instructions given on the screen. When you’re done you should have an application id. In this case, it is ‘saush-snip’. We will be needing this application id in our configuration later. You will also need to enable Java for your GAE/J. At this point in time, GAE/J is still in beta and Google is only limiting the first 10,000 developers from enabling Java for GAE/J. Unfortunately if you don’t get Java enabled for your account, you won’t be able to try this out until it is fully released and available to all.
Once you have signed up and gotten an email approval for your GAE/J account, the first thing to do is to install JRuby, if you haven’t done so yet. Even if you have installed it previously you might want to install at least 1.3.0RC1 since some fixes were added into this release to make it run better under GAE/J. Run this:
$ git clone git://github.com/jruby/jruby.git
This will clone a copy of JRuby into your computer. Then go into the jruby folder that was just created and run this:
$ sudo ant && sudo ant jar-complete
This will install JRuby and create the jruby-complete.jar library that you will need in a while. Take note of this path to JRuby, you’ll need it in the subsequent commands. Assume that you just installed JRuby in ~/jruby, do a quick check to see if the install is ok:
$ ~/jruby/bin/jruby -v
If you installed version 1.3.0RC1 you should see something like this:
jruby 1.3.0RC1 (ruby 1.8.6p287) (2009-05-11 6586) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_07) [x86_64-java]
After installing JRuby, you’ll need to install all gems needed for this application. Remember that even if you have installed gems for your normal Ruby installation you’ll need to install it all over again for JRuby. For Snip, you need Sinatra and HAML, but you’ll also need Rake and Warbler, the JRuby war file packager.
$ ~/jruby/bin/jruby -S gem install rake sinatra haml warbler
Now that the basic JRuby and related gems are done, let’s look at the Snip code itself. One thing that is pretty obvious upfront when dealing with AppEngine is that it doesn’t have a relational database for persistence. Instead of a familiar RDBMS, we get a JDO interface or a DataStore API. How do we use it? As it turns out, we don’t need to do anything major. Ola Bini wrote a small wrapper around DataStore, called Bumble, to allow us to write data models just like we did with DataMapper. Well, almost.
Using Bumble is very much similar to DataMapper and ActiveRecord, so I didn’t have to change my code much. This is the DataMapper version of the Url model:
DataMapper.setup(:default, ENV['DATABASE_URL'] || 'mysql://root:root@localhost/snip') class Url include DataMapper::Resource property :id, Serial property :original, String, :length => 255 property :created_at, DateTime def snipped() self.id.to_s(36) end end
And this is the Bumble version of the Url model:
class Url include Bumble ds :original def snipped() self.key.to_s end end
I didn’t add in the time stamp for the Bumble version because I don’t really use it but as you can see there are quite a bit of similarities. I didn’t need to put in my own running serial id because it’s managed by the AppEngine. Also, instead of using the object id, I used the object’s key, which again is managed by the AppEngine. A key is a unique identifier of an entity across all apps belonging to the user. The key is created automatically by Bumble through the low-level DataStore Java APIs. Besides this, using the Url class is slightly different also. Instead of
@url = Url.first(: original => uri.to_s)
We use:
@url = Url.find(: original => uri.to_s)
Finally because we don’t use the id anymore and use the key instead, we don’t need to do the base 36 conversion so we let the AppEngine handle everything. Instead of:
get '/:snipped' do redirect Url[params[:snipped].to_i(36)].original end
We use:
get '/:snipped' do redirect Url.get(params[:snipped]).original end
This is the full source code:
%w(rubygems sinatra bumble uri).each { |lib| require lib}
get '/' do haml :index end
post '/' do
uri = URI::parse(params[:original])
raise "Invalid URL" unless uri.kind_of? URI::HTTP or uri.kind_of? URI::HTTPS
@url = Url.find(:original => uri.to_s)
@url = Url.create(:original => uri.to_s) if @url.nil?
haml :index
end
get '/:snipped' do redirect Url.get(params[:snipped]).original end
error do haml :index end
use_in_file_templates!
class Url
include Bumble
ds : original
def snipped() self.key.to_s end
end
__END__
@@ layout
!!! 1.1
%html
%head
%title Snip! on Google AppEngine
%link{:rel => 'stylesheet', :href => 'http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Modernist', :type => 'text/css'}
= yield
@@ index
%h1.title Snip! on Google AppEngine
- unless @url.nil?
%code= @url.original
snipped to
%a{:href => env['HTTP_REFERER'] + @url.snipped}
= env['HTTP_REFERER'] + @url.snipped
#err.warning= env['sinatra.error']
%form{:method => 'post', :action => '/'}
Snip this:
%input{:type => 'text', :name => 'original', :size => '50'}
%input{:type => 'submit', :value => 'snip!'}
%small copyright ©
%a{:href => 'http://blog.saush.com'}
Chang Sau Sheong
%br
%a{:href => 'http://github.com/sausheong/snip-appengine'}
Full source code
The code is ready but here comes the packaging. GAE/J is a Java servlet environment, which means our app needs to be packaged into a war (Java Web ARchive). Fortunately instead of building up the war by hand we can use Warbler, the JRuby war packager. Before running Warbler, we need to have a couple of things. Firstly we need to build the warble configuration file:
$ mkdir config $ ~/jruby/bin/jruby -S warble config
We create a directory called config and get Warbler to copy a default configuration file to it. Replace the contents with this minimal setup. If you want to explore more, read warble.rb itself.
Warbler::Config.new do |config|
config.dirs = %w(lib public views)
config.includes = FileList["appengine-web.xml", "snip.rb", "config.ru", "bumble.rb"]
config.gems = ['sinatra', 'haml']
config.gem_dependencies = true
config.war_name = "saush-snip"
config.webxml.booter = :rack
config.webxml.jruby.init.serial = true
config.java_libs.reject! { |lib| lib =~ /jruby-complete/ }
end
Note that we don’t really need the public and view directories in Snip because everything is in a single file. The 2 other configuration files we will need are appengine-web.xml and config.ru. We also need to include the snip.rb and bumble.rb into the war file for deployment. To get bumble.rb, go to Ola Bini’s Bumble GitHub repository and get the file that is in the sub-folder (not the main one). The last line tells us not to include the jruby-complete.jar library in the lib folder when we run Warbler. I’ll explain this in a minute. Also note the war file is the application id of the application we created in the GAE admin console earlier on (saush-snip).
Next, create a lib folder. Go to the GAE/J download site and download the GAE/J Java library. It should be called something like appengine-api-1.0-sdk-1.2.0.jar. Copy that into the lib folder you’ve just created. We will also need the Java libraries in the lib folder. Normally for a JRuby deployment, Warbler will package it in, but Google has a 1,000 file limit which Ola Bini kindly pointed out. He also provided a script to split the JRuby library into 2 files. You can find the script here and when you run it, it should split jruby-complete.jar into 2 files named jruby-core-1.3.0RC1.jar and jruby-stdlib-1.3.0RC1.jar. You will also need JRuby-Rack but it’s included in Warbler and as you will see later, Warbler will copy it into the war when you run it. JRuby-Rack is an adapter for the Java servlet environment that allows Sinatra (or any Rack-based application) to run.
The next piece is appengine-web.xml. I used Ola Bini’s version as the base:
<appengine -web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">
<application>saush-snip</application>
<version>1</version>
<static -files />
<resource -files />
<sessions -enabled>false</sessions>
<system -properties>
<property name="jruby.management.enabled" value="false" />
<property name="os.arch" value="" />
<property name="jruby.compile.mode" value="JIT"/> <!-- JIT|FORCE|OFF -->
<property name="jruby.compile.fastest" value="true"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.frameless" value="true"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.positionless" value="true"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.threadless" value="false"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.fastops" value="false"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.fastcase" value="false"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.chainsize" value="500"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.lazyHandles" value="false"/>
<property name="jruby.compile.peephole" value="true"/>
<property name="jruby.rack.logging" value="stdout"/>
</system>
</appengine>
The list row in the property line sets logging to STDOUT, which is very useful for debugging. If you don’t set this, you might not be able to see any console output. Again, we need to set the application id that we got earlier on (saush-snip).
Finally we need a config.ru Rackup file to start the whole thing:
%w(rubygems sinatra snip).each { |lib| require lib}
root_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
set :environment, :production
set :root, root_dir
set :app_file, File.join(root_dir, 'snip.rb')
disable :run
run Sinatra::Application
You can of course also find all these things in the Snip-AppEngine repository at git://github.com/sausheong/snip-appengine.git. However it is so much more fun to do it step by step right?
Now that we have all the pieces let’s package our files for deployment. First we need to generate the exploded war file:
$ ~/jruby/bin/jruby -S warble
You should see output like this:
mkdir -p tmp/war/WEB-INF/gems/specifications cp /Users/saush/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/sinatra-0.9.1.1.gemspec tmp/war/WEB-INF/gems/specifications/sinatra-0.9.1.1.gemspec mkdir -p tmp/war/WEB-INF/gems/gems JRuby limited openssl loaded. gem install jruby-openssl for full support. http://wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_Builtin_OpenSSL cp /Users/saush/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/rack-0.9.1.gemspec tmp/war/WEB-INF/gems/specifications/rack-0.9.1.gemspec cp /Users/saush/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/haml-2.0.9.gemspec tmp/war/WEB-INF/gems/specifications/haml-2.0.9.gemspec mkdir -p tmp/war/WEB-INF/lib mkdir -p tmp/war/WEB-INF/public mkdir -p tmp/war/WEB-INF/views cp lib/appengine-api-1.0-sdk-1.2.0.jar tmp/war/WEB-INF/lib/appengine-api-1.0-sdk-1.2.0.jar cp lib/jruby-core-1.3.0RC1.jar tmp/war/WEB-INF/lib/jruby-core-1.3.0RC1.jar cp lib/jruby-stdlib-1.3.0RC1.jar tmp/war/WEB-INF/lib/jruby-stdlib-1.3.0RC1.jar cp appengine-web.xml tmp/war/WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml cp snip.rb tmp/war/WEB-INF/snip.rb cp config.ru tmp/war/WEB-INF/config.ru cp bumble.rb tmp/war/WEB-INF/bumble.rb cp /Users/saush/.gem/jruby/1.8/gems/warbler-0.9.13/lib/jruby-rack-0.9.4.jar tmp/war/WEB-INF/lib/jruby-rack-0.9.4.jar cp /Users/saush/.gem/jruby/1.8/gems/warbler-0.9.13/lib/jruby-rack-0.9.4.jar tmp/war/WEB-INF/lib/jruby-rack-0.9.4.jar mkdir -p tmp/war/WEB-INF jar cf saush-snip.war -C tmp/war .
You will also get a saush-snip.war file and a bunch of files under the tmp folder, which is really just the war file exploded. We won’t need the war file (saush-snip.war) itself for deployment, only the tmp directory. Before doing the deployment, we need to make a minor adjustment to the tmp/war/WEB-INF/gems/gems/sinatra-0.9.1.1/lib/sinatra.rb file. Somehow the line ‘use_in_file_templates!’ gives an error when deploying to the GAE/J so comment it out.
That’s it! We are ready for the deployment. To deploy run this command:
$ ~/appengine-java-sdk-1.2.0/bin/appcfg.sh --email= --passin update tmp/war/
You should see output like this:
Reading application configuration data... 2009-05-15 19:51:38.916::INFO: Logging to STDERR via org.mortbay.log.StdErrLog Beginning server interaction for saush-snip... Password for : 0% Creating staging directory 5% Scanning for jsp files. 20% Scanning files on local disk. 25% Scanned 250 files. 28% Initiating update. 31% Cloning 340 application files. 33% Cloned 100 files. 34% Cloned 200 files. 35% Cloned 300 files. 40% Uploading 0 files. 90% Deploying new version. 95% Will check again in 1 seconds 98% Will check again in 2 seconds 99% Closing update: new version is ready to start serving. 99% Uploading index definitions. Update complete. Success. Cleaning up temporary files...
Now go to http://saush-snip.appspot.com and you should be able to see the new deployment of Snip on the Google AppEngine for Java.
A few other tutorials on the Internet also describe how to deploy Sinatra or Rails-based apps on GAE/J, amongst which Samuel Goebert’s tutorial and Ola Bini’s stand out the most.
A few thoughts on comparing Heroku and GAE/J since I’ve deployed on both of them now. Heroku is definitely the easier platform to deploy, with a just few simple steps compared to the hoops I had to jump for GAE/J. Heroku also has the arguably more familiar persistence mechanism as it uses the familiar RDBMS (postgresql) compared to Google’s DataStore implementation, which today only has Ola Bini’s Bumble implementation compared to the established ActiveRecord, DataMpper and Sequel ORMs. In addition, Google’s implementation has many limitations, some harder to understand than others, which forces applications to suit this platform rather than having the platform really service the application.
On the other hand, Google’s set of tools in its console is really impressive, with graphs of usage, data and log viewers. Google AppEngine also has memcached, url fetcher, integration with Google accounts, sending out mails and hosts of other helper services. Also, Google’s brand name does add some weight when you throw in more mission critical projects though Heroku, backed by Amazon’s EC2 services is no push-over. As for costs, until large deployments emerge it is hard to say which is the better deal, also it really depends highly on usage patterns.
So are they evenly balanced out? Not for me at least. For now I would still favor Heroku over GAE/J because Heroku is more friendly to Ruby developers. But who knows? It’s exciting times for Rubyists.
Packt Author Award 2009 – Vote for my book!
It’s a year to the month since I published my first book – Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects. I didn’t even realise it — time really does fly. Just got a mail from my publisher announcing that they’re having an award for the best author of the year. If you’re one of my readers, or if you enjoyed reading this blog please consider voting for my book.
Here’s the link – http://authors.packtpub.com/content/packt-author-award-2009. Just click on Vote Now! and select Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects in the list of books to vote for. Thanks!
Third party user authentication with Ruby in a just few lines of code
Some time ago (8 years to be exact) when I was still chest-deep in Java and working in elipva, I wrote Tapestry, a centralized user management system and also an article in Javaworld describing it. That particular project is long gone (it got merged into elipva’s Zephyr product and disappeared as a standalone system) but the problems I wrote about are really quite universal.
To summarize, the main problem that Tapestry tried to solve was that software applications that serve more than 1 user at a time usually require its users to sign in. To do that, most of the time, we create a user management module. Within this user management module we need to provide these 2 major services:
- Authentication — you are really who you say you are
- Access control — you have permission to do what you want to do with something
As you can imagine, authentication is usually simpler than access control. Tapestry’s approach was to externalize these services into a configurable standalone system that provides both services. While I never really completed Tapestry, there are many third-party providers of these services in the market now. In this blog post I will talk about authentication and explain some ways to easily integrate your Ruby application with these third-party authentication providers.
But before that, some background. In the open era, 2 different open technologies have surfaced to solve the the issues of authentication and access control separately. OpenID is a popular digital identity used for authentication, originally developed for LiveJournal in 2005. It’s supported by many large companies including Yahoo, Google, PayPal, IBM, Microsoft and so on. As of Nov 2008, there are over 500 million OpenIDs on the Internet and about 27,000 sites have integrated it. OAuth is a newer protocol used for access control, first drafted in 2007. It allows a user to grant access to information on one site (provider) to another site (consumer) without sharing his identity. OAuth is strongly supported by Google and Yahoo, and is used also in Twitter.
At the same time, many larger organizations started to tout their proprietary own authentication and access control mechanism. Microsoft started its Passport service in 1999 and received much criticism along the way (later it changed its name to Windows Live ID). Soon after, in September 2001, the Liberty Alliance was started by Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Novell and so on (which many considered a counter to Passport) to do federated identity management. As mentioned, Google is one of the initial and strong supporter of OAuth but it also offers an older AuthSub web authentication and ClientLogin client authentication APIs while being an OpenID provider (it calls its OpenID service Federated Login). Yahoo started supporting OAuth officially in 2008, in addition to its older BBAuth APIs and is also an OpenID provider. Facebook joined the race in 2008 with Facebook Connect, which does authentication as well as share Facebook information. MySpace also came in with their platform in 2008, originally called Data Availability, which quickly became MySpaceID. In April 2009, Twitter started offering ‘Sign In with Twitter‘, which true to its name, allow users to sign in with their Twitter accounts. In addition to that Twitter uses HTTP basic authentication to protect its resources, and also recently announced support for OAuth.
As you can see there’re really lots of players in the market. RPXNow, which I blogged about previously, took advantage of these offerings and came up with a unified and simplified set of APIs to allow authentication with Yahoo, Google, Windows Live ID, Facebook, AOL, MySpace and various OpenID providers.
Looking from another perspective, there are 2 types of third party authentication APIs:
- Web authentication for web applications
- Client authentication for desktop or mobile client applications
The main difference between these 2 types of authentication is that web authentication can redirect the user to provider’s site for him to enter his username and password, then returns to the calling web application, usually with a success or failure token. Client authentication (usually) cannot do this, and would require the application to capture the username and password, which is sent by the client application to the provider. Obviously from a security point of view, web authentication is more secure and re-assuring to users since the user never needs to pass the username and password to the application at all.
Let’s jump into some code now. I will give 2 examples of both web authentication and client authentication each. You can find all the code here at git://github.com/sausheong/auth.gi
Let’s start with RPX because that’s the easiest. Using RPX is probably the easiest way to do third party web authentication with a large number of different providers. You can either use its provided interfaces (either embedded or pop-up Javascript) or you can call its simple API to authenticate your web application. Here’s a simple Sinatra example.
There are just 2 files. rpx_auth.html is in the public folder:
<form method="POST" action="https://chirp-saush.rpxnow.com/openid/start?token_url=http://localhost:4567/login"> <input type="hidden" name="openid_identifier" value="yahoo.com" /> <input type="image" src='https://a248.e.akamai.net/sec.yimg.com/i/yahoo.gif' /> </form>
This is the input form. Notice that it is entirely in HTML (it’s just a simple form submit with one post parameter). The actual work is done by auth.rb in the root folder:
%w(rubygems sinatra rest_client json).each { |lib| require lib}
get '/login' do
'You are logged in!' if authenticate(params[:token])
end
def authenticate(token)
response = JSON.parse(RestClient.post 'https://rpxnow.com/api/v2/auth_info', :token => token, 'apiKey' => <rpx API KEY>, :format => 'json', :extended => 'true')
return true if response['stat'] == 'ok'
return false
end
You will need to register an application in RPXNow. In this example, I’m reusing Chirp-Chirp’s application in RPXNow, which is why you see the post action is to the server chirp-saush.rpxnow.com. The token is the URL that RPX will redirect to after it authenticates the user. The pleasant surprise here is that it allows you to redirect to localhost, which eases the development effort. In this example also, I’m using Yahoo as the OpenID provider. RPXNow provides a host of other popular providers — in Chirp Chirp I actually used Yahoo, Google and Windows Live ID though it provides a lot more others. I used an image button to submit but that’s to prettify the page.
Notice that RPX redirects to the localhost with the URL ‘/login’. I created a get method for this, which in turn passes the returned token to the authenticate method. Inside this method, I used Adam Wiggin’s (of Heroku fame) really convenient rest-client library to send a post request with the token and the API key provided when you register for an application. I indicated that I want to receive the response in JSON. The response is parsed for the status and can also be parsed for data. For simplicity I didn’t return the Yahoo user information (but it’s a really small subset of data only) though I could potentially parse the JSON data for it.
And that’s it! You now have web application authentication by a third party provider, courtesy of RPX.
What if you don’t want to have a middleman like RPX to do web authentication? In this example, I was using RPX Basic, which is free because I’m using an rpxnow.com domain. If I want my own domain for authentication, I need to pay for commercial account with RPX (which is really their business model). An alternative is to use OpenID directly instead, which is very popular and doesn’t add too much complexity.
This is the input form for OpenID authentication, openid_auth.html:
<form method="get" action='/login'> OpenID identifier: <input type="text" class="openid" name="openid_identifier" size='50'/> <input type="submit" value="Verify" /><br /> </form>
The input requires the user to enter an OpenID identifier. If you’re not sure what an OpenID identifier is like you can check it out here. Most likely you’d already have one. Just like in the RPX case, the user is redirected to the OpenID provider, where he is requested to log in to that provider. After logging in, he will be returned to the calling application.
This is the Sinatra app that does this work, in a file called openid_auth.rb:
%w(rubygems sinatra openid openid/store/filesystem).each { |lib| require lib}
REALM = 'http://localhost:4567'
RETURN_TO = "#{REALM}/complete"
get '/login' do
checkid_request = openid_consumer.begin(params[:openid_identifier])
redirect checkid_request.redirect_url(REALM, RETURN_TO) if checkid_request.send_redirect?(REALM, RETURN_TO)
checkid_request.html_markup(REALM, RETURN_TO)
end
get '/complete' do
response = openid_consumer.complete(params, RETURN_TO)
return 'You are logged in!' if response.status == OpenID::Consumer::SUCCESS
'Could not log on with your OpenID'
end
def openid_consumer
@consumer = OpenID::Consumer.new(session, OpenID::Store::Filesystem.new('auth/store')) if @consumer.nil?
return @consumer
end
Note that it is not that much longer than the RPX code. I used the ruby-openid gem from JanRain, which is probably the defacto OpenID Ruby library. The steps are only a bit more complicated:
- The input form asks the user to enter an OpenID identifier and sends it to the ‘/login’ get block (it could easily be a post block)
- The ‘/login’ block first gets a consumer object. To create the consumer object, you need to pass in the session where you will store the request information (this is usually provided by the web framework) as well as a store. The store is the place where we keep associations, the shared secrets between the relying party (your application) and an OpenID provider as well as nonces, cryptographic one-time alphanumeric strings used to prevent replay attacks. In the example above, I created the store in the file system.
- Once we have the consumer, we initiate the start of the authentication process by calling its begin method with the identifier, which returns a CheckIDRequest object. This object contains the state necessary to generate the actual OpenID request
- Next we ask the CheckIDRequest object if we should send the HTTP request as a redirect or if we should produce a html post form for the user
- Then we either redirect the user to the OpenID provider or create a HTML form that does the same thing. Here we provide a return_to path for the OpenID provider to return the user to our application with a bunch of other data
- Once the user authenticates himself, he will be sent back to our application, and I used another get block ‘/complete’ to process the returned data
- We don’t need to go through the returned parameters one by one, we can re-use the same consumer object we created earlier and use the complete method to process those parameters
- The complete method returns a response object, which we can check for status
The process actually looks more complicated than it really is. The ruby-openid library simplifies the processing a great deal. In the example above, I only wanted to check if the user is valid or not, if I wanted to get more data on the user, there are a bunch of other things we can do.
We’ve just covered the web authentication. Let’s move on to client authentication, which doesn’t involve a browser. Google provides ClientLogin, which is an authentication API specifically desktop or mobile clients. Using it is actually simpler than web authentication. For this example and the next, I will use Shoes, the excellent Ruby GUI toolkit by why the lucky stiff. To run the code, you need to download and install Shoes, then follow the instructions on how to execute Shoes applications. I won’t go through how to create a Shoes application here though, that’s for another day. Here’s the complete code for using Google’s ClientLogin API, in a file called goog-auth-client.rb:
Shoes.setup do
gem 'rest-client'
gem 'net-ssh'
end
%w(rest_client openssl.so openssl/bn openssl/cipher openssl/digest openssl/ssl openssl/x509 net/ssh).each { |lib| require lib}
class GoogleAuthClient < Shoes
url '/', :login
url '/list', :list
def login
stack do
title "Please login", :margin => 4
para "Log in using your Google credentials!"
flow :margin_left => 4 do para "Email"; @me = edit_line; end
flow :margin_left => 4 do para "Password"; @password = edit_line :secret => true; end
button "login" do $me = @me.text; authenticate(@me.text,@password.text) ? visit('/list') : alert("Wrong email or password"); end
end
end
def list
title "You are logged in!"
end
def authenticate(email,password)
response = RestClient.post 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin', 'accountType' => 'HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE', 'Email' => email, 'Passwd' => password, :service => 'xapi', :source => 'Goog-Auth-1.0'
return true if response.code == 200
return false
end
end
Shoes.app :width => 400, :height => 200, :title => 'Google Authenticator'
You might notice that I actually included a large number of libraries. This is because there is a problem in the current Shoes build, which didn’t include the OpenSSL libraries so we’ll need to add them in manually. The method to focus on is really the authenticate method. I used the rest_client library again to send a post request to the ClientLogin URL. the parameter ‘service’ indicates which Google service you want to access. In our case, we just want to authenticate a Google user, so we can use the generic service name ‘xapi’. The ‘source’ parameter is a short string that identifies our application, this is for logging purposes only.
An alternative to ClientLogin and just as easy is Twitter’s basic authentication service. The code is also exactly the same. Here’s the code, in a file named twit-auth_client.rb.
class AuthClient < Shoes
url '/', :login
url '/list', :list
def login
stack do
title "Please login", :margin => 4
para "Log in using your Twitter credentials!"
flow :margin_left => 4 do para "Username"; @me = edit_line; end
flow :margin_left => 4 do para "Password"; @password = edit_line :secret => true; end
button "login" do authenticate(@me.text,@password.text) ? visit('/list') : alert("Wrong user or password"); end
end
end
def list
title "You are logged in!"
end
def authenticate(user,password)
open("http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.xml", :http_basic_authentication=>[user, password]) rescue return false
return true
end
end
Shoes.app :width => 400, :height => 200, :title => 'Blab!'
Let’s jump into the authenticate method again. I used OpenURI to send a get request to the verify credentials API. Twitter uses basic authentication to protect its resources, so we need to pass in the user and password information as well (notice that OpenURI allows you to use basic authentication). I could parse the returned results, but what happens here is that if the user and password information is invalid, it will throw an error anyway, so I just do a rescue and return false. If all is well, I can just return true.
You might notice that the code that allows me to use both Google and Twitter as a the third-party authentication provider is just a single line! Don’t you just love Ruby?
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