Repoze.what is an authorization framework for wsgi applications, based on repoze.who (which deals with authentication and identification).

on the one hand, it enables an authorization system based on the groups to which the authenticated or anonymous user belongs and the permissions granted to such groups by loading these groups and permissions into the request on the way in to the downstream wsgi application.

and on the other hand, it enables you the programmer to manage groups and permissions from the application itself or another program, under a backend-independent api. for example, it would be easy to switch from one back-end to another, and even use this framework to migrate the data.

this is just the authorization pattern it supports out-of-the-box, but it supports other authorization patterns with custom predicates. it's highly extensible, so it's very unlikely that it will get in the way and can be extended to check for many conditions (e.g.: checking that the user comes from a given country, based on her ip address).