How can I access a user role in Drupal from a separate application?

Question

Is there a plugin/standard HTTP API for accessing user roles/permissions in a Drupal 6 instance from other applications, e.g., on different hosts?

Our organization uses Shibboleth to allow easy authentication across all our hosts, but I'd like to use our central Drupal 6 installation to manage user roles rather than storing roles data in each separate application we build, e.g., in Zend Framework.

Of course we could run direct queries on the Drupal DB from these apps, but I'd prefer to not.

Answer 1

You could look at the Drupal Services API provided by the Services module. This will allow you to log in as a specific user then you can via XML-RPC call specific functions to retrieve the pertinent information. If you wanted more functionality the services module is very easy to extend to your needs also.