Users and Roles (Part 3)

In Part 2, I talked about how an almost trivial data simplification can turn a difficult-to-maintain system into a system with a surprising amount of power and flexibility. In this third and final post, I want to discuss a design principle that could help us to design simple, flexible systems without having to go throw a painful, labor-intensive set of iterations first.

Users and Roles (Part 2)

In Part 1 I described the kind of situation you get into with a naive access control system based on tying everything to a user ID: it starts out easy, but then gets harder and harder to change as the business needs evolve.

In Part 2, I want to look at how we can create a more robust and flexible system by "de-complecting" the separate ideas of user identity and access control.