Jim Faut and Rick Palkovic have been posting a nice series on how to troubleshoot OpenSSO with Firefox Add-Ons. They just pushed out two more entries in the series, which now includes:

• Part 1: Introduction • Part 2: Single Sign-On and Policy Protection • Part 3: Cross-Domain Single Sign-On • Part 4: Service Provider Initiated Fedlet Single Sign-On • Part 5: Identity Provider Initiated Fedlet SSO Fedlet deployment

These articles are worth a check even if you just want to learn about how OpenSSO works: just follow their diagrams to see the exchange of information between the parties that enable these features.

And, on this topic, you may want to track the participation of the OpenSSO team at next week's Internet Identity WorkShop; see Daniel's note.

And Happy Halloween!

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.

What's your opinion of GlassFish Issue #1047? Oh, you haven't memorized all of our Issue Tracker entries? So an ID number with no other context is pretty meaningless? Well, you're probably not alone there. Vince's latest blog entry shows how to use Greasemonkey to customize how Firefox displays the Java.net Issue Tracker pages for GlassFish. So instead of a not-so-helpful title like "glassfish: Issue 1047," you can get one which includes the issue summary, like "#1047: version -verbose isn't verbose enough."

There are lots of options for tracing web applications. But suppose you need a holistic view, such as a combined trace of the server-side Java and client-side JavaScript in an Ajax app. You might expect your options to drop to zero. Well, they don't. DTrace can handle it. The Mozilla DTrace Project provides DTrace probes for Firefox's JavaScript engine, and recent versions of the JVM have built-in probes. Amit's latest article shows how to put these together to trace an Ajax application. It produces a true end-to-end picture, with traces flowing across the client/server boundary.

We are way past the feature brainstorming phase for GlassFish V2 but I think we should start thinking on how to do this for V3 and we may want to check how Firefox is doing it. Check this article in The Register and the Brainstorming Wiki Should we plan a similar approach for collecting ideas for GlassFish V3?