zenstack VS CASL

Support for Polymorphic Associations #430

Another strategy is to model access control declaratively and enforce it in the application layer. ZenStack (built above Prisma ORM) and Hasura are good examples of this approach. The following code shows how access policies are defined with ZenStack and how a secured CRUD API can be derived automatically.

ZenStack is a toolkit built above Prisma that adds access control, automatic CRUD web API, etc. It unleashes the ORM's full power for full-stack development.

We need to have some concrete language to build to help make sense of things. I always felt real-world examples are much more effective than toys, so I'll use the ZModel language that we're building at ZenStack as an example. It's a DSL used to model database tables and access control rules. To keep the post short, I'm going only to use a small set of features to demonstrate. Our goal will be to compile the following code snippet:

It's assumed that you know the basics of using Prisma. Prisma is an excellent ORM. But it doesn't have a built-in authorization solution. To supplement that, we'll use ZenStack throughout the samples. ZenStack is a toolkit that supercharges Prisma in many ways. One of the features is to provide a declarative way to model authorization. Its modeling language, ZModel, is a superset of Prisma Schema Language, so it should be easily understandable to people familiar with Prisma.

[Feature Request] Support for Polymorphic Associations #430

ZenStack takes a unique approach and solves the problem at a slightly higher level: the ORM. It is implemented above Prisma ORM and supports a wide variety of databases. It extends Prisma to allow modeling access policies inside the data schema and enforces them at runtime by injecting into Prisma queries.

If you generate Prisma queries as we do here, you can inject extra filtering conditions into the generated query object. Here's the nice thing: ZenStack can do it automatically for you.

ZenStack for automatic enforcement of access control. ZenStack is a toolkit that extends Prisma ORM to allow you to model access policies and data schema in one place.

You can find numerous libraries dedicated to authorization, depending on the language you use. For example, CASL is a Javascript library that helps you model flexible authorization schemes utilizing a set of declarative APIs. The “give me the list of Article readable to the current user” problem can be modeled and queried like the following:

You must do something like ACL, Cognito layer isn't the way to achive what do you want to do. Remember, Cognito isn't nothing more than an 3rd party authorization provider with user pools, restricted access to your own resources must be handled in your logic app layer instead Cognito. However I suggest you to read about ACLs (can you check out this ie https://github.com/stalniy/casl) and differences between ACLs and authentication providers.

PS If you do mobile / web work (or something else with "detached" UI), I find that declarative access control rules are far superior to imperative ones, because they can be serialized and shipped over the wire. For example, backend running cancancan can be easily send the same rules to casl on the frontend, while if you used something like pundit to secure your backend, you either end up re-implementing it in the frontend, or sending ton of "canEdit" flags with every record.

I'm trying to integrate @casl/vue with Vue 3, and I'm afraid I'm having problems.

Do you have any experience? How does it compare to other alternative like https://casbin.org, https://casl.js.org? There are tons of libraries, actually I'm little bit lost.

CASL