The 10th FISL starts this week. Like previous years, it looks like a lot of fun: the Program is full of good content, and there is also Porto Alegre... FISL starts on the 24th and it is preceded by Javali, an event focused on Java, on the 23rd (Agenda).

I did a quick pass through the FISL program to highlight some sessions, including those related to GlassFish Projects and friends:

• Arun on GF, MySQL and NetBeans (S205) (Arun's note)
• Mauricio on OSGi in GFv3 (S736)
• Ludo will talk about OpenDS (S473) (Ludo's note)
• Fabiane on Hudson (S733)
• Pat on OpenSSO (S360) (Pat's note)
• Fabio Veloso on Jersey (S282)

Other talks related to GlassFish include

• On OpenJDK, Bruno (S734) and Charlie (S226)
• On OpenSolaris Rafael (S600) and Brian (S749)
• On NetBeans et al, Geertjan (S735), and
• On OSS, Simon (S757),

I wish I was there! If you attend FISL or Javali, please report back.

A reminder that tomorrow, Sunday May 31st, is our GlassFish and OpenSSO Unconference and also the Party at The Thirsty Bear. The Thirsty Bear is a popular hangout during JavaOne; they have great food and drinks and it is very close to The Moscone (see Google, Live). An RSVP is appreciated to assess food needs. PS. I have not been able to post news recently because of J1/C1 preparations - plus this year's extra distraction - but this year my commitments are early in the week and I will try to catch up afterwards.

The OpenSSO Fedlet has received an Awards at the European Identity Conference for (providing) a lean solution for the Identity Federation. Some more details in SuperPat's writeup, including an interview with Pat. Congratulations to the OpenSSO team and thanks to Jacki and Dan for the tips.

There are a couple of nice short webcasts on OpenSSO. The first one builds on the latest OpenSSO Express; it is a short webcast that shows how to federate SSO to GoogleApps in 4 minutes using Express 7 and the SDK. The second is a neat iPhone App (POssO) that provides access (read/write) to an LDAP directory.

OpenSSO reached 1000 members last week. As I mentioned in my blog entry at Superpatterns, this means that 1000 people have registered at opensso.dev.java.net to be able to participate in the mailing lists and forums, and to be able to file and track issues. OpenSSO is on a real upward trend right now, with a whole bunch of events over the next few weeks, at the RSA Conference, MySQL Conference, European Identity Conference and more. See my blog entry for details, and come along if you can!

Mon-Thu I'll be attending the MySQL User's Conference here in Santa Clara. The tone of the conference is noticeably different to that of its (even larger) sibling JavaOne in San Francisco, and the topics are very grounded in the practical needs of the Users of the technology. There are many very interesting talks, below is a small selection extracted from my Personal Schedule. Starting with those related to topics we normally cover here: Several BOFs: OpenSSO, OpenDS and LDAP, JavaFX Clients, OpenSolaris and Web Stack. Several Technical Sessions: MySQL and ZFS, Twitter and NetBeans and GlassFish and MySQL (that's Arun).

The rest of this list is not comprehensive but, here it is...

• Keynotes: State of the Dolphin, Google, KickFire, Cloud, Andi, SmugMug, Infobrite and JasperSoft, Obama.
• Fun Events Quizz Show.
• Tutorials: Scale out, MapReduce, Partitioning, Memcached
• DTrace: Intro, MySQL and Dtrace, Another DTrace
• Cloud: MySQL and EC2, Hadoop and MySQL, Cloud Backup for MySQL, MySQL Clusters in the Cloud, MapReduce
• Drizzle: Rethinking MySQL, Memory, libdrizzle, Drizzle BOF, Clusters
• Memcached: Beginners, Distributed and InnoDB, And Flash!, Libraries, Advanced Use
• Engines: InnoDB, Falcon, Maria, PBXT.
• General: Performance and Scalability, the Future, Code Contributions (Masood's), Craig's List, Sandbox, Death.

... and I reserve the right to add and/or remove entries from my schedule at any time :-)

The Smoking Monkey has announced the release of OpenSSO Express Build 7, which includes key new features including: • Federation with Google Apps Premier • Additional Containers (like GlassFish v3 Prelude!) • Support for OpenDS Standard Edition OpenSSO Express is a very interesting product as it is an integral part of our official Roadmap and is fully supported. Sun will answer questions and will fix bugs on it but, unlike with OpenSSO Enterprise, customers are required to upgrade to a later Express or to the Enterprise binary to get the fixes.

The upgrade requirement means that the sustaining tail is much shorter, and manageable, which is why we can push the Express releases as often as we do. An Express release is not for all types of customers but it is ideal for those that want the latest features now and are willing to upgrade later; and those that do not want them just wait for the Enterprise releases. To simplify the sales story, the support plan for OpenSSO Enterprise includes OpenSSO Express.

Other related entries are tagged OpenSSO.

The registration for our CommunityOne Unconferences is now open. We are hosting two intertwined events, one for all the GlassFish projects, the other for OpenSSO, OpenDS et al. Both in Hall A at the Moscone (Wikipedia, GeoHack) the Sunday before JavaOne, May 31st. Both events are free, and you can switch back and forth as your interests apply. Check the GlassFish Unconference page and the OpenSSO Day MeetUp and Topics page.

The unconferences will be followed with a Party at the Thirsty Bear. We have plenty of space at the Moscone but the TB space is limited, so I encourage you to sign up early.

I've added SlideCasting to the recordings of the TheAquarium Online shows. The first 3 presentations are from last week's OpenSSO Overview, Adoption and Roadmap presentation; see, for example, the OpenSSO Roadmap by Sidharth Mishra. SlideShare.Net provides a nice tool to create these SlideCasts but every format adds to the time I spend on this, so I am considering dropping a format or two. Please consider visiting this Doodle Poll to vote for your favorite formats.

I just uploaded the recordings to last Thursday's Webinar, which explained how OpenSSO implements Single Sign-On, Federation and Secure Web Services with minimal chances to the existing code (the show also covered the deployment at Verizon Wireless and the roadmap). Another way to see what's happening is inspecting the actual exchanges and Jim and Rick's article shows how to Troubleshoot OpenSSO using Firefox Add-Ons: Part I, Part II and Part III.

Related Webinars and Blog Entries:
• OpenSSO Roadmap
• OpenSSO Webinar
• Entries tagged OpenSSO

PS. So far I've only uploaded the recordings in Flash Video; I'll follow-up with the other formats early next week, including a new SlideCast version. After that I will ask for your feedback on the benefits of the different formats.

This week's webinar is on OpenSSO, the open source project that provides enterprise-quality infrastructure to implement single-sign on. Sid and Ajay will present a technical overview of OpenSSO and then will explain how it is being used in a real-world deployment. The presentation will end with a roadmap for the features in future releases of OpenSSO. Presentation on Thursday, March 19th, 11am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page.

As Bert, Daniel and Mark have all blogged over the past couple of days, OpenSSO's release schedule is now online. The schedule lays out the features planned for the next four OpenSSO Express release, culminating in OpenSSO Enterprise 8.1, scheduled for March 2010.

This is a new level of transparency for the OpenSSO project, and shows the breadth of new features planned for the next few months, from ease-of-use improvements for federation to a completely new entitlements engine for fine-grained authorization, all phased in over a series of supported 'Express' releases, so you can try them out, deploy them and even get fully support from Sun as each feature is integrated into OpenSSO. Exciting stuff!

Eduardo mentioned CommunityOne back in December, when he announced the call for papers. CommunityOne East, to be held at the Marriott Marquis at Times Square, New York City, on March 18-19, is fast approaching now, and I'm pleased to announce that, on the day before CommunityOne East, Tuesday 17th March 2009, the OpenSSO Community will be gathering just a couple of miles down Broadway at New York University's Kimmel Center for the very first OpenSSO Community Day.

This is a unique opportunity for OpenSSO contributors, deployers and users to get together for a whole day of presentations and discussion in an 'unconference' format - the only fixed agenda item right now is to figure out the agenda. We're collecting ideas over the next few weeks at the OpenSSO wiki; if you're thinking of attending, do go there, take a look, and add any topics you want to speak on or hear about. Admission is free, with breakfast and lunch provided, and Daniel says he'll even bankroll the first round in the pub afterward .

So, if you're heading to New York City for CommunityOne, why not go early for a day (and possibly night!) of OpenSSO. If you're based in NYC, well, you have no excuse, go sign up, right now!

Gartner recently released the Nov 2008 report on Web Access Management and Sun is now listed in the leader's quadrant (see image). This is good news, both as a recognition of our efforts and also because some customers use the Magic Quadrant to evaluate the viability of some vendors. Sun's product in this space is OpenSSO 8 Enterprise - the commercial distribution of OpenSSO. The product version runs on GFv2 but it can also be used on GFv3 prelude; just need this small workaround :-) Of course it will be fixed in the final v3.

There's been quite a bit of activity around OpenSSO; other recent news include connectivity to SalesForce, and to SugarCRM, Using simpleSAMLphp, and even a .Net prototype. If you want to track all OpenSSO news, you may want to check SuperPat (Pat Patterson) and Smoking Monkey (Daniel Raskin).

Our latest Adoption Story comes from Belgium thanks to SuperPat. Telenet (home, wikipedia) is the largest supplier of broadband cable services in Belgium. They needed fine-grained access control for internal applications and ACA-IT provided it through OpenSSO. See Questionnaire for full details.

For more adoption stories, check our Informal Stories. We are always looking for stories showcasing production use as these are critical to the growth of our community. If you are a happy user please consider sharing your story by sending us mail to stories at sun dot com.