Superpatterns

OpenSSO Tab Sweep - Sep 11 2009
[ authentication layer7 openid opensso policyagents sdn webinar wordpress xml ]

Wow - it's been months since the last OpenSSO tab sweep. Anyway - here's a collection of the latest news from the world of OpenSSO:

• Sun Developer Network continues to publish excellent articles on OpenSSO. Last month, Rick Palkovic of SDN and Francois Lascelles of Layer 7 Techologies collaborated on Delegating XML Gateway Runtime Authorization to OpenSSO, showing how Layer 7's SecureSpan XML Networking Gateway integrates with OpenSSO to provide edge security for SOA, Web 2.0 and cloud-based web services.
• This month, Rick's written another article, this time with Qingwen Cheng and Mrudul Uchil of Sun's OpenSSO engineering team. Enabling IP/Resource/Environment Based Authentication With OpenSSO is a three-part series explaining how this functionality, new in OpenSSO Express Build 8, replaces the pre-existing Gateway servlet to provide a flexible mechanism for including contextual information in the authentication process.
• My colleague, Hubert Le Van Gong has been blogging profusely over the past few weeks on the topic of OpenID 2.0 and OpenSSO. As Hubert mentions, we recently rewrote the OpenSSO OpenID extension to support OpenID 2.0. Hubert's blog entries cover a number of topics specific to the rewrite, including deployment (with an important follow up) and realm/relying party validation. C'est la Vie is definitely a blog worth watching if you're interested in the OpenID/OpenSSO intersection.
• There have been a number of OpenSSO policy agent releases over the past few weeks, including agents for Apache 2.2 and IIS 7. The OpenSSO Policy Agents 3.0 Roadmap is the place to stay up to date.
• The replay of Daniel's OpenSSO webinar from last month, which, by the way, set an internal record for registrations, has been posted online. Click here to catch up.
• Outside Sun, 'Pairg' has released a WordPress plugin for OpenSSO authentication (thanks, Ramoonus, for the tip!). It looks to have much more functionality than the proof of concept code I released a little while ago, so, if you're into WordPress, I recommend you go take a look.

Now I can close a few Firefox tabs and relax. Have a good weekend, everyone!

links for 2008-02-12
[ history standards timbray w3c web xml ]

• XML People
  Engaging essay by Tim Bray on the folks involved in the birth of XML
  (tags: timbray xml history standards w3c web)

Is anyone using DSML?
[ dsml lsap xml ]
Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) "bridges the world of directory services with the world of XML" (quote from OASIS DSML page). Effectively, it's an XML encoding of LDAP. Sun implemented it in Directory Server 5.2 way back in June 2003, in common with other directory server vendors (Novell, Microsoft).
The question is, is anybody using it? I've never heard of a DSML client in production, and, in my unofficial popularity poll, Google shows only 115,000 hits for DSML, compared to over 7 million for LDAP.
So - has anybody implemented DSML from the client side? And if not, why not?