Simple Modular Access Control List

SMACL is a php library, and a framework, for developing web application that requires a complex permissions system.

Generic ACL libraries have their own data representation of the objects used for permission assign and check. Usually you already have a set of entities in your application database, to which you wish to apply permissions.

For that purpose you have to generate a duplicate through the permissions library system. This kind of data redundancy is not only memory inefficient, it also leads, most of the times, to data incoherency problems.

Most of ACL libraries rely on a data model where the implementation is not flexible enough. Even when they use a third-party library which provides access to more than one type of database, it still relies on another language (SQL) for the communication. This makes the task of extending the system (beyond a sql database framework) almost impossible, because you have to deal with the intermediate language. The other option you have is to rewrite whole the system to your needs.

ACL objects representation in SMACL is based on the same ideas from the phpGACL library. Objects are divided in ACOs, AROs, and AXOs.

Each object is represented by a type/name pair. The type of an object represents more than a symbolic group, objects with the same type are considered to come from the same data source. When you extend SMACL to recognize your own objects, you have to assign them to a new type.