I recently started a new project using different carefully-chosen technologies, my project is built as follow :
The approach is API-Centric, which means I'm building a website and an iOS app communicating with an API written using Symfony2. I've successfully managed to write my API, and it is perfectly working.
To gain access to the services provided by the API, the main actors (the website users, the iOS app users and the developers) can authenticate theirself in several ways :
Clients can gain access with a login/password couple through the website interface which is communicating directly with the API through AJAX to validate the provided credentials and set a session. So, when someones logs in our website, they have automatically access to the API as well.
Developers can authenticate theirself through the API using HTTP-Basic over SSL, which will as well generate a session and give them access to the services they are authorized to call.
Also, Developers and clients can gain access to the website and the API using their facebook account through the Facebook Connect functionality. This deletes the step where each actor has to create an account on our website.
So basically, the credentials are provided either through HTTP-Basic or using the Facebook Login functionality.
Now that my authentication system is working and that my clients are able to access the website, I would like them to connect to a real-time server when they log in. Like in Facebook or Google+ if you want where the real-time server manages chat and push informations.
In this case i'm using Node.js and the powerfull socket.io library to manage everything that deals with the real-time side.
Of course, the real-time service will need some credentials to authenticate the user since he is authenticated to the Symfony security system with a session but is not authenticated against the real-time server.
A solution I've been thinking about would be to use the PdoSessionStorage in my API (Symfony side) and store all the active sessions in a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. Doing so, I would be able to send to my real-time server the session id generated by symfony and check on the database if the session id provided is correct or not. If he is I'll let the user access the services provided by my real-time server and associate his session with an identity.
But I really don;t know if this is a good solution and I would like some more experienced advices on this and on how to deal with this issue.
Note : For some reasons, I cannot implement OAuth even if it could be a solution to solve this issue using a Single Sign On approach.