support for login / auth for web apps

[David Schwartz 415]

I had a call today with the guys from deScope about using their login / auth service with my TMS WEB Core app. It's very flexible and it has a ton of features. 

 

https://www.descope.com/

 

I was looking at Memberful, as they have something similar plus they also do member management and billing. But they don't have any way to add custom fields to the user profile that can be hidden from the UI, which seems really strange. I was told they just don't see a need for it. Nothing like listening to your users, eh? And they only allow a few custom fields to be added.

 

descope lets you add any number of custom fields to the user records. And they make it super-easy to include multiple ways of letting users login, including email/pwd; sms to your phone; finger-print, facial recognition, and several social media site logins. Their platform also lets you create "flows" where you can use a drag-n-drop designer to map out actions and results to define different logic flows. It's very flexible.

 

Does anybody know of any others?

Edited July 11, 2023 by David Schwartz

[Wagner Landgraf 43]

One of the most famous authentication SaaS is Auth0. Never heard about descope before. While those tools are really full-featured, they can get expensive pretty fast if your app grows.

 

TMS Sphinx is our (TMS Software) alternative Delphi library for those solutions, where you build your own "descope-like" or "auth0-like" server yourself:

 

https://doc.tmssoftware.com/biz/sphinx/guide/

 

Things like "adding custom fields to user profile" would obviously not be an issue, since you have full control your authentication server.

 

TMS Sphinx doesn't have all those enterprise features they offer, of course. But it's still OAuth2 compliant and has many features for an authentication server that servers most purposes, even for multi tenant, public SaaS services.

 

 

Edited July 11, 2023 by Wagner Landgraf

[David Schwartz 415]

Great points, Wagner. I guess we're talking about different levels of integration here. it's possible to build something like descope on top of Sphinx, and then expand it to do what Memberful does as well, and even go beyond that.

 

I'm sure that descope's target customers aren't low-level programmers, given that they have built a visual drag-n-drop "no-code" designer for people to use. There is an API that can be used to do whatever you'd need, but it also gives access to the things created in the Flows editor.

 

Memberful is also a "no-code" solution with an API, but their API is much simpler and maps more directly to what the main UI presents.

 

I'd love to see more examples of higher-level "no-code" integrations for Delphi users. Embt has funded the development of complete applications that are available in GetIt for free, but those are rather extreme examples at the other end of the spectrum.

 

Two examples that come to mind are Mitov's no-code designer that integrates into the IDE, as well as what TMS has done with WEB Core that also integrates into the IDE.

 

The TMS Diagram Studio, Workflow Studio, and Query Studio (maybe others) are also likely candidates: they have both a design-time no-code aspect, as well as a run-time aspect that can deliver a no-code solution to users.

 

Other than most report-writing tools, nothing else comes to mind off-hand that fit this paradigm. I suspect there are some examples out there ... anybody have any ideas?

 

Note that descope and Memberful are both viable "no-code" businesses with a growing user base. Adding such logic on top of something like Sphinx would need to have a way to work independently of Delphi to fit into the "no-code" market. What neither descope nor Memberful offer is the ability to interface with them at a much lower level, which is what a Delphi foundation might offer. (It doesn't mean they'd have to offer source code, just more low-level control.) But it can also be argued that descope's API offers this level of support already, which allows Delphi to be used anyway.

 

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by David Schwartz

[Wagner Landgraf 43]

4 minutes ago, David Schwartz said:

Note that descope and Memberful are both viable "no-code" businesses with a growing user base

Do you have reliable sources for this?

 

Quote

What neither descope nor Memberful offer is the ability to interface with them at a much lower level, which is what a Delphi foundation might offer.

I don't know those tools specifically, but that's basically what a "no-code" solution is. Otherwise it would be a "code" solution. 🙂