Appengine app as an OpenId provider. Is it possible?

Question

I have an application hosted on Google AppEngine. This application requires user authentication. I know that users can be authenticated through OpenId, Google accounts and so on. However, some users do not have these accounts. Therefore, I must assume that they create an OpenId or Google account before they can access my application. I was wondering if it is possible to host the OpenId provider hosting inside the AppEngine, instead of asking the user to leave, create an OpenId and come back later, I could just display a simple form. In this form, this user can create a new account and at the same time create an OpenId, since the application will also be an OpenId provider. I am not sure if I can host the hosting and OpenId provider inside the appengine. Would I? Many thanks

Answer 1

http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-samples/ contains an example OpenID provider application. It uses Google accounts for authentication, but it should not be too difficult to use it to create your own accounts.

Of course, it’s a little strange that you want to create accounts for your service for users, but then use openID to authenticate them with this service for yourself; why not just have an identifier without OpenID in addition to OpenID if you want to manage user accounts yourself?