We made the Sea Cadets ‘Single Sign On’ system plain sailing
Sea Cadets is a national youth charity, working with 15,000 young people between 10 and 18 years old across the UK. It has over 400 units across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Island, Malta and Bermuda all run by 9,000 volunteers.
The platform Sea Cadets offer, are built on the customs and traditions of the Royal Navy.
Challenge
Sea Cadets were building multiple web projects simultaneously and they required a central user, sign-on system to integrate the projects together. Sea Cadets engaged with the human tech agency to build a backend Single Sign On (SSO) to integrate with multiple sites.
What we did
We started with an investigation of the existing provided codebase to work out the most effective way in which the human tech agency could introduce the Single Sign On functionality.
In order to deliver the project in a tight timescale, our solution was to integrate with systems that were still in development, meaning they were not available to us while building our software. To help with our development, mock services had to be created to emulate third party systems - this gave us the challenge of trying to ensure our Single Sign On functionality would function correctly in a variety of languages and for each use case that we may face.
An existing backend system and database were provided in Python and MySQL using the Django framework. As we would be working closely with the provided database and existing API’s we developed our solution in Python to keep the technology stack as close as possible to the clients provided projects.
Our single sign on solution consistently and silently works in the background allowing all configured websites to use the functionality to log in and communicate between each other.
Result
As the project came to an end, we supplied the client with full handover documentation on the SSO code.
We’ve had minimal technical questions following our delivery, and to date, there have been no support issues.