I've written countless login mechanisms. To be honest I'm sick of them. But there's a better reason to go with SSO only in my next app. User friendliness.
SSO is user friendly
SSO mechanisms are quite slick. Instead of sending users through yet another boring signup form, sending out verification emails and forcing eye cancer upon them with an unreadable captcha, they just click a button, authorise an app and off they go.
The key lays in their existing accounts with major services like Google, Facebook or Twitter. Those services are doing a fantastic job in verifying signups. So people went through all that already. Their profiles are verified and trustworthy.
Clicking a button to make a service accessible is therefore a huge improvement for many users. Besides, have you ever filled out a lengthy signup form on a mobile phone? SSO buttons eliminate any need for that at all, resulting in more signups.
SSO makes development easier
SSO is confusing at first. There are many things involved in the process. I've once written the process in PHP as a Typo3 plugin. It was hell back then and I never really understood what happened there.
I'm still not much better off when it comes to the understanding of all the things involved in the process. However, times have changed and it's much easier to do.
I've looked into passport.js, a node.js library. It supports many different SSO mechanisms, partially through additional node modules. Whats even more interesting however is it's integration into the express framework.
That integration is so huge to me that I abandoned my first CouchApp only prototype in favour of node.js with express.
Again, getting started is not exactly easy. Luckily I found this video which walked me through a basic Facebook setup. If you're looking to get started with passport.js, I suggest you check it out.
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