Chapter 2.  Adding User Accounts

The chat application we built in the previous chapter focused on high performance transmission of messages from the clients to the server and back again. However, the way things stand, our users have no way of knowing who they would be talking to. One solution to this problem is building some kind of sign-up and login functionality and letting our users create accounts and authenticate themselves before they can open the chat page.

Whenever we are about to build something from scratch, we must ask ourselves how others have solved this problem before (it is extremely rare to encounter genuinely original problems) and whether any open solutions or standards already exist that we can make use of. Authorization and authentication can hardly be considered new problems, especially in the world of the Web, with many different protocols out there to choose from. So how do we decide the best option to pursue? As always, we must look at this question from...