Sun Enterprise News is covering the recent Liberty Alliance Day in Tokyo. Hmmm – perhaps the orange Liberty Alliance soccer shirt wasn’t the most flattering thing I could have worn…
Archive for November, 2006
Big in Japan
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006Federation Boot Camp
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006You might have read Hubert‘s recent blog entry on the Federation Boot Camp – an intensive week-long course covering advanced Federation Manager topics. Hubert has more news on the Boot Camp today – hop on over there for the course description, and email for more information.
About Me – Pat Patterson
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
I realized that the About page here is broken (probably in some upgrade of Roller), so here is some current information about me, your humble author. I’ve written it as an entry in the ‘About Me’ category so I can post updates, you can comment, whatever.
I’m Pat Patterson, a federation architect working on Sun’s OpenSSO, Sun Java System Access Manager and Sun Java System Federation Manager. I’m British – born in England of Scottish parents and grew up in the fair concrete city of Coventry. I’ve been working on internet security with Java since 1997, when I wrote my first ever piece of commercial Java code – an ASN.1 library for decoding X.509 certificates.
So, what do I actually do?
- Much of my time is spent on OpenSSO, particularly the mechanics of opening up what was a proprietary software product to be an open source project.
- I’m driving a sub-project of OpenSSO – ‘Lightbulb‘ – the first fruit of which is a SAML 2.0 service provider implementation in PHP.
- I participate in the Liberty Alliance Project Technical Experts Group (TEG) as a representative of Sun Microsystems.
- I regularly speak at events such as Java One, Liberty Alliance Day and Identity Open Space.
- And finally,
maintaining my personality cultblogging.
There is more information about me on my LinkedIn profile.
Bertram, the Googol Engine
Sunday, November 5th, 2006
Count the zeros – it’s absolutely correct!
A conversation, some weeks ago. The scene: Tom and I searching the web for pictures of bridges, using a well known search engine.
- Tom: “Daddy, what’s a ‘Google’?”
- Me: “It’s a website you can use to search for things.”
- Tom: “Why is it called ‘Google’?”
- Me: “Because there are lots of things and ‘googol’ is a very big number.”
- Tom: “How big, daddy?”
- Me: “Very big – if you wanted to write it you’d put a one then a hundred zeros.”
- Thoughtful silence.
The other day:
- Mummy: “What’s that you’re drawing, Tom?”
- Tom (painstakingly counting zeros as he writes them onto a line drawing of a locomotive): “It’s Bertram. He doesn’t have a number, so I’m making him the googol engine.”
Added Single Logout to Lightbulb – SAML 2.0 in PHP
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006
I just finished adding single logout to the ‘Lightbulb’ OpenSSO SAML 2.0 PHP implementation. I’ll take this opportunity to reiterate: THIS IS BY NO MEANS PRODUCTION CODE. There are probably bugs, there are certainly shortcuts. This is development out in the open.
Please do feel free to pick this up, play with it, suggest improvements – even contribute code. As I mentioned before, there is a bit of process to this, but I think it’s more than worth it.
The next step for me now is to write a how-to on getting an IdP up to play with…
OpenSSO J2EE Agent Architecture Document and Source Code Available
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006
Quoting the announcement:
The J2EE agent Architecture document and the source code for the Sun Java System Application Server 8.2 are now available.
- A PDF of the J2EE Architecture document is posted here https://opensso.dev.java.net/files/documents/3676/43131/j2eeagent_arch.pdf.
- The source code for the J2EE agent for Sun Java System Application Server 8.2 is available from the OpenSSO CVS tree https://opensso.dev.java.net/source/browse/opensso/products/j2eeagents/. A README located in this directory specifies the location of build and installation instructions.
The nightly build is available here http://download.java.net/general/opensso/nightly/j2eeagents/.
Give it a try!
More J2EE agents source code will follow in next few months. Stay Tuned!
Some minor work is still to be done to get this working with Glassfish – keep watching the skies 
