I recently stumbled onto the OpenBar (http://www.37signals.com/ openbar) feature within the different 37signals apps and would like to do something like this for the internal apps I am working on right now.
I'm almost finished with a little custom openid server app that manages profiles for employees as well as being able to define what sites users have access to. As of right now, they can sign into that server and see their apps and just click on a link from there to sign in, but having something always on each site with a list of available apps would be even better.
I'm just wondering what would be the best way to do something like that. The only way I can think of is building a web service on top of my openid server that each app can request the other apps for the currently logged in user, but as I haven't worked with web services much, I'm not sure about the most appropriate way of getting/storing the data. I'm guessing I would want to cache the request until the user logs out so that I wouldn't be sending a request to my openid app each time a page is loaded, but I'm not sure.
I would love to hear any suggestions from anyone! Thanks.