Superpatterns

It's been a while since Build 4 of OpenSSO, as we work towards an early access (EA) build of Sun Federated Access Manager 8.0, OpenSSO's commercial 'twin'. Our plan designates OpenSSO build 5 as the FAM 8.0 EA, but we still have some minor issues to iron out before we're ready for EA, hence the release of OpenSSO 1.0 Build 4.5.

Here are some of the new features in Build 4.5, compared to Build 4:

• The Fedlet - quick and easy Federation for SP's, where you'd rather (slightly) modify your web app than deploy more infrastructure - much more on the Fedlet in the Sun blogosphere.
• Federation Validator - test harness for checking single sign-on between a SAML 2.0 Identity Provider and Service Provider.
• SiteMinder Integration - support for co-existence of OpenSSO and SiteMinder.

Many more enhancements are listed at the bottom of the Build 4.5 release notes. Watch the OpenSSO blogosphere for more details on these new features.

The more I work on OpenSSO, the more I realize the nuances of open source development. The fact that we released this 'interim' stable build between builds 4 and 5 is one example of this - the demand for build 4.5 has come from the OpenSSO community, which is now MUCH larger than the FAM team within Sun.