Do you believe clearance is better than using the restful authentication plugin? What are the benefits/differences that you find most compelling?
I like how it is much more unobtrusive then the others. Also has tons of options and add-ons
The restful authentication plug, on the other hand, is nasty. When you hear people talk about the evils of code generation, restful auth is the kind of thing they're talking about.
What do I mean by that? The generators that come with Rails are (IMHO) good. They generate a very minimalistic skeletal structure. What they generate is small, easily understood, and easy added to/replaced by your own code as you go. All the complex gnarly pieces are in the Rails libraries, where they belong, not in the generated code. The built in Rails generators are basically the command-line equivalent of the "new class" type wizards that come with most IDE's
Restful authentication, on the other hand, comes with generators that spew out massive amounts of generated code. It's not scaffolding, it's a mass one way dump of autogenerated code.
Functionality that should be in a nice library where it can be easily upgrade with each new version of the framework is instead spewed out in generated model and controller code. You will then have to modify this generated code for all but the most trivial uses of restful auth, thereby ensuring you'll never have a clean way of upgrading your app to a new version of restful auth. Meaning that if there are security fixes in a newer version of restful auth, you're gonna have to be responsible to merge them into your code manually.
But even so, to say the code that restful_auth generates is nasty either betrays your ignorance and/or shows that you tow some party line that I've never been privvy to. The code it generates is perfectly fine. It was written by Rick Olson, who (as I well know) is a fantastic developer. It doesn't support tons of extra bells and whistles like Clearance and friends, but who really needs a lot of the stuff they offer in every app? It's deadweight.
In fact, depending on which branch you get of the restful_auth plugin, the code it generates abstracts stuff away in modules that you include (so you don't have to go through that oh so cumbersome maintenance you seem so caught up on) and it generates all the stuff you'd have to create by hand for Clearance.
"The plugin now generates much less app-space code: the controllers are super skinny now, and if any security flaws are discovered it should be less painfulto stay current."
I applaud their new direction, but IMHO the fact that this is their new direction validates my point that their old direction was just plain wrong. Code generation is little different than "cut and paste" programming.
Then again, if you're hacking the plugin (as you apparently have to do) you're sort of stuck anyway. I've never had to do such a thing. crosses fingers