Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

6.4. Authorization Handlers

Sometimes it's sufficient to know that a user can prove his or her identity, but more often that's just the beginning of the story. After authentication comes the optional authorization phase of the transaction, in which your handler gets a chance to determine whether this user can fetch that URI.

If you felt constrained by HTTP's obsession with conventional password checking, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. Authorization schemes, as opposed to authentication, form no part of the HTTP standard. You are free to implement any scheme you can dream up. In practice, most authentication schemes are based on the user's account name, since this is the piece of information that you've just gone to some effort to confirm. What you do with that datum, however, is entirely up to you. You may look up the user in a database to determine his or her access privileges, or you may grant or deny access based on the name itself. We'll show a useful example of this in the next section.

6.4.1. A Gender-Based Authorization Module

Remember the bar that lets only women through the door on Ladies' Night? Here's a little module that enforces that restriction. Apache::AuthzGender enforces gender-based restrictions using Jon Orwant's Text::GenderFromName, a port of an awk script originally published by Scott Pakin in the December 1991 issue of Computer Language Monthly. Text::GenderFromName uses a set of pattern-matching rules to guess people's genders from their first names, ...