Superpatterns

One new area of work in OpenSSO is Identity Services, allowing a developer to easily write code to authenticate users, check if those users are authorized to access resources, retrieve those users' attributes etc. While all of this functionality has long been available in different forms, the new Identity Services work collects common identity tasks into an easy-to-use set of web services accessible via SOAP and REST. Now developers working in just about any language can join the identity party

Last month, Aravindan and Marina published a Sun Developer Network article showing how to use OpenSSO's identity services for authentication. This month, Lakshman Abburi joins them to cover authorization with identity services. The identity services client from part 1 is extended to check whether the authenticated user should be allowed access to a given resource, in this example, a URL. Although the article focuses on Java and NetBeans, as I mention above, you can invoke identity services from just about anywhere. Go read the articles, have a play, and leave a comment here or there if you do something really cool.

It's been a busy couple of weeks, what with a trip to Tokyo, a typhoon on the day I flew out, an earthquake at home and the usual backlog of 1000 emails that follows any trip away from the office, so please excuse the recent dearth of blog entries!

On returning, I was pleased to see Sun Developer Network's identity pages have continued their expansion. The latest additions are:

• An Access Manager/Federation Manager FAQ area, with general FAQs and specific lists for the admin console, authentication and single sign-on/sessions.
• Aravindan and Marina have written an article on authentication with identity services - the first of a series of articles on securing apps with identity services. In this context, identity services refers to a set of simple web services we are implementing to provide access to authentication, authorization and other related services via SOAP or REST.

Kudos to Marina and Aravindan for their tireless work on the Sun Developer Network identity pages - if you're working with Sun Java System Access Manager and related products, you should definitely subscribe to the feed .