I have just released the latest version of EzCrypto which has the new Rails support I mentioned in my last post.

Everything is as transparent as possible. See the EzCrypto docs for more info.

I will try to write a bit more about it later.

Usage patterns

The only thing I just want to write about is that it currently supports the following two usage patterns:

One key one record

@doc=Document.new
@doc.enter_password "my very own secret"
@doc.title="Plan to take over the world"
@doc.save

This is probably not very useful, but it is the simplest of all patterns.

One key many records

This is mirrors a database one to many pattern where the parent has the key and is known in ActiveCrypto as the KeyHolder.

@user=User.new
@user.enter_password
@user.save
@doc=Document.new
@doc.user=@user
@doc.title="Plan to take over the world"
@doc.save

This will probably be the most useful of the two patterns.

Shared Keys

This pattern is not implemented yet in ActiveCrypto, although I do use it in StakeItOut. I am working on a way to simplify the usage of it to make it as easy and straightforward to use as the One key many records pattern. I am guessing version 0.3 will have this.

I welcome feedback. As mentioned I am doing for me some pretty hairy ruby programming linking it into Rails. I would like to hear suggestions from some of the actual Rails frameworks maintainers and others about what could be done to improve it and integrate it even better into rails.