Things have been pretty quiet on the identity front here at The Aquarium over the summer vacation season - time to kick things up a notch with a look at the recent feast of OpenSSO-related articles on the Sun Developer Network's identity pages: In part 4 of the 'Securing Applications With Identity Services' series: 'Single Sign-On and Logout', Prashant, Aravindan and Marina show how OpenSSO's REST-based identity services can be put to use in integrating a sample Java web application with OpenSSO. This approach was used in Prashant's integration of Liferay with OpenSSO, which also works in WebSynergy. 'Integrating Applications With OpenSSO', by Tatsuo, Aravindan and Marina, covers integration with OpenSSO via policy agents, reverse proxies, the client SDK, and identity services. There's a great worked example of integrating Ruby on Rails with OpenSSO, applying OpenSSO's identity services beyond the world of Java.

The fifth interview 'From the Trenches at Sun Identity' has Marina talking to OpenSSO senior product manager Nick Wooler on Support for OpenSSO, explaining how customers can now buy support for OpenSSO via OpenSSO Express.

Finally, Aravindan Ranganathan talks to Marina about Identity Services for Securing Web Applications. As you can probably tell, identity services is one of the hottest components in OpenSSO right now!

For all the latest OpenSSO articles and more, subscribe to the SDN Identity Feed - there's plenty more in the pipeline!

As Michael and I already reported, OpenSSO v1 build 2 is now available at the OpenSSO download page. There are some pretty major advances in this build, most notably the centralized server and agent configuration. My blog entry gives more detail, while Michael's has a vintage TV commercial - take your pick

Once you've downloaded the new build, you can go work through the latest tutorial over at the Sun Developer Network Identity Pages. Regular authors Aravindan and Marina are joined by Lakshman Abburi to cover authorization with identity services. Now that the nights are drawing in (if you're in the Northern hemisphere!), what could be better than settling down with a nice cup of hot chocolate and working through a tutorial or two?

While standarda such as SAML and XACML provide flexible, interoperable frameworks for exchanging authentication and authorization data, developers are sometimes left wanting something simpler - "Just give me an easy way to authenticate a user and check if they are authorized to access a resource".

We've been working on this in OpenSSO these past few months, building a simple set of identity services; web services for authentication, authorization, attribute retrieval and logging. With SOAP and REST endpoints, just about any application can manipulate identities in a very simple, robust way. Check out Aravindan and Marina's recent article on authentication with identity services. Subscribe to the Sun Developer Network identity feed to catch further article in this series.