Policy Agents, SugarCRM, simpleSAMLphp and OpenSSO

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.