Archive for December, 2008

Policy Agents, SugarCRM, simpleSAMLphp and OpenSSO

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

A couple of great articles from Sun Developer Network over the past two weeks… First on the roster, Sean Brydon and Aravindan Ranganathan team up with the ever-present Marina Sum for a short series entitled ‘Protecting Applications With Java EE Policy Agents’. Part 1:Basic Steps provides an excellent grounding in just what a policy agent does, and how to deploy and configure one with OpenSSO. Download the sample Java EE web application and work through the example that Sean and Aravindan present.

Next up, Thomas Varghese and Marina tackle Single Sign-On for SugarCRM Through a SAML-Based Integration of OpenSSO and simpleSAMLphp. Regular readers will know that I have a soft spot for simpleSAMLphp, since it evolved from the ‘Lightbulb‘ SAML/PHP code that I wrote as a proof of concept many (Internet) years ago. Here, Thomas uses simpleSAMLphp as a lightweight bridge between the PHP-based SugarCRM and OpenSSO, showing how a fictitious SugarCRM hosting company provides single sign-on to its enterprise customers. In this context, simpleSAMLphp is effectively a PHP Fedlet, or perhaps the Fedlet is a Java simpleSAMLphp . Either way – go read all about it at SDN.

What’s Your Blog’s Personality?

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Doc points to his Linux Journal entry in which he discusses Typealyzer, a site that, given your blog URL, divines its ‘personality’ as a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Of course, the first thing I did was to point it at myself, with somewhat surprising results. According to Typealyzer, Superpatterns is ISTJ – a ‘Duty Fulfiller‘. From Typealyzer:

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work in their own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

Now, I consistently test as ENTP – the ‘Visionary‘ – hands waving in the air in front of the whiteboard, the opposite of Superpatterns on every axis except ‘thinking’, in fact. I suppose Superpatterns must be where I reveal my quiet, methodical side

OpenSSO – a Web Access Management Leader

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Another year, another Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Access Management. Where 2007 saw Sun Access Manager entering the leader space, close to the leader/challenger ‘cusp’, this year Sun OpenSSO Enterprise is solidly in the magic leader quadrant.

As Daniel mentions, we saw great growth this last year, so it’s puzzling that they list ‘flat growth’ as a ‘caution’ for us. Then again, that is the only caution, so I guess they had to find something negative.

On the positive side, they list our market leadership, full range of features, leadership in open source identity, the strength of the OpenSSO community, our innovation around the Fedlet and much, much more. Pick up the report, courtesy of Sun, and see for yourself.