Channel Five launches new Single Sign-On system

Having made it to the development roster at Channel Five, we at Ibuildings were delighted to engage in our first real project there over our (scorching) summer 2008. There were actually a few interesting things happening at Five: strategic digital consulting work led by Made By Many, a totally new stack being implemented by the new hosting partner, Claranet, as well as a burst of site development activities.

In order to avoid the potential pitfalls of so many new things occurring simultaneously, we tried to make everything as straightforward as possible for our first project, a REST implementation of a Single Sign-On service. In fact, having to work through APIs is a great way to avoid conflicts and dependencies (i.e. cover backsides), and some might hide behind an API specification. However, in this case we had other projects being developed in parallel that would consume the services, sooner rather than later.

The outcome of this project is that you can now register and login to Channel Five websites in a seamless manner. The first site to use the Single Sign-On is http://fwd.five.tv/ (developed by a third party) which encompasses The Gadget Show and Fifth Gear. You will also see that more sites will come on stream that use this service, in the *very* near future.